Right now the ingredient drops of animal mobs are quite random, and oddly so (how come most rabbits I kill don't have feet?)

I'd love to see the following system:

• You kill an animal
• You skin/butcher an animal, if you have the right tool
• Your loot results are determined by your knowledge of the animal (and perhaps the quality/type of tool)
• RNG has no part!

The animal knowledge trees would thus have ingredient unlocks as well as abilities, which would make it even more interesting to get knowledge for creatures without abilities (like rabbits!).

So, at rabbit knowledge level x%, you unlock the ability to always loot a rabbit foot.

As to humanoid mobs like goblins, this system could still work, but only for ingredients that are innate to their bodies, like tongues (and not simply something they might be carrying).

Talents

I really enjoyed the talent system! Gave me a good reason to go out doing everything different I could. I also felt like with talents, I was powerful enough to solo more content (notably wisps).

Suggestions on talents/knowledge:

• Sixty talent points seem too few somehow!
• Would be cool if crafting also provided knowledge.
• I wish the base attributes were set via the talent system.

Roads

I enjoyed the paved road system, especially since I wound up running through a bunch of town centers simply because it was beneficial to do so.

The ninety degree turns in the middle of nowhere felt odd, but I'm assuming all of those were in potentially claimable town locations.

Player-made stone roads need the speed bonus!

Cities

The bank, tavern, and town hall are cool. I also liked the wood stacking system for the carpenter.

I'm not entirely sure, however, I like how much crafting content is gated to cities (even though it will pressure players to join cities, which will help me out as a governor).

As a neutral point, I didn't notice any difference between large and small towns, other than the number of possible house plots. City status descriptions were somewhat confusing.

The worst part for me may have been laying claim blueprints: they often didn't work, for no apparent reason, even when the color said they were placeable.

Suggestions on towns (obvious permission problems aside):

• Would be very nice to have multiple bank tabs!
• Quarries: we need a quarry building for mass stone block production!
• Tree farms would also be a nice addition
• When mass-placing claims (or anything else, like tubs), would be awesome if I could check a "repeat" box, so I didn't have to navigate the crafting interface just to select the same thing again
• Are there going to be 5x5 or bigger house claims, so we can build the biggest houses?
• Would love a way for citizens to leave messages for me in the Town Hall

Other pros

I liked seeing the endurance bar become prominent.

Gripes

I don't enjoy the randomness inherent to the enchanting system. I tolerate it, but it feels like a good concept dragged down.

Target selection is frustrating. The best spells for me are those that don't require a target, simply because I can reliably use them in a fight.

Mob sniping/stealing shouldn't be possible. If party A gets a mob down to 1% health, lone player B shouldn't be able to take the last hit and get all the knowledge and loot. A system that weighs the damage done by varying parties involved to determine who gets the kill would be very nice.

I don't enjoy gear permanently wearing out. Would be nice if we could at least repair it.

I don't enjoy the amount of hard CC in the game (even in PvE). CC basically takes me out of the game, and I've never found that enjoyable.

We really need party icons on the map!

I'd love to be able to build a wizard tower on a wilderness plot! Specifically:

• Multiple interior stories (at least three!)
• Ability to place the crafting stations for weaving, staff creation, and item enchanting (as well as a real fireplace/bed for memorization)
• Outdoor herb garden plots and animal pens (in the eight tiles around the central tile)
• No upkeep; just up-front upgrade/build costs
• Customizations for my Aristocrat pack! (I'd trade existing bonuses for this.)

I could see other themes as well:

• Hunter's Lodge (allows placing of woodworking and leatherworking stations/tubs)
• Outlaw Camp (blacksmithing stations)

That would provide more options than just which city to join.

@Medic

Some big differences:

• Albion has vertical progression, but Fractured has horizontal progression, as implemented by the knowledge system.
• Albion is based on NPC PvE-only cities. In Fractured, as far as I know, all cities will be player-built. This will likely make the Fractured world far more immersive (more like EVE Online).
• Albion has many small maps. Fractured has a few much bigger ones (entire continents, at this point). The single Fractured continent in Alpha feels huge compared to AO's world. Also, I get the impression there will be much less teleporting around.
• Albion's endgame is PvP only, basically. Fractured will have a planet devoted mostly to PvE (Arboreus), although it can still be invaded to an extent.
• Fractured has RNG in combat (Albion, as far as I know, does not).
• Fractured characters will be combat-ready quickly, due to the starting attribute system, whereas in Albion, you are simply what gear you wear.

I was in the test, but I couldn't play it, since it's not supported on Win 8.1 I'm not going to upgrade my system (and potentially my hardware) just for New World, so we'll see if they make it any more backward compatible in future test.

If not, I'll be waiting a while. I did notice that the game didn't seem to have a lot of new concepts, just old ones bolted together.

This was one of my suggestions for a next-gen open world MMO, and I think it largely applies to Fractured too:

Been thinking about this more, and here’s a more in-depth example of what a next-gen MMO could do:

Dynamic Wildlife Biomes

In my experience, MMOs usually have static mob spawners that do little more than replace mobs at static intervals.

Instead, what if wildlife were dynamic, changing in the world and changing the world? Here’s one possible implementation:

• Boar mobs are configured to seek out forest biomes
• A core boar spawner is placed in a forest biome, adding X boars over Y interval
• If the active boar population in the area reaches Z, then level up the spawner

The leveled spawner can now do several new things:

• Send squads of boars to investigate nearby territory for expansion
• Spawn higher-level boars, tougher, of course, and with better possible ingredients if killed
• Spawn a Boar dungeon in the heart of the forest, with (naturally) a nasty boar boss. If players complete this dungeon too many times, the spawner is considered subdued, and loses a level, ultimately reverting back to core and despawning the dungeon

The boars will thus seek to expand their territory within specific biomes (and not human-recognized territories, of course), going to war with the current wildlife in those biomes if needed. If successful, the boars will place an auxiliary boar spawner in the conquered biome, that works in all ways like the core spawner, except it can be destroyed.

At the same time, any predator that considers boars to be prey will find the increased population of boars a tasty, tasty treat! They may attempt to move in to the forest biome, and thus place an auxiliary spawner of their own kind within the boar biome (since the boars themselves are a biome to the predator).

Note how this makes “kill X mob” missions more interesting. A faction may not want boars to increase in its area, and thus will post meaningful “kill X mob” quests to control the boar population.

Or, a faction may want to prevent an enemy faction from reaping the benefits of higher-level boar ingredients, and thus post PvP boar-poaching missions, or PvP missions to complete a boar dungeon in enemy territory.

Note also how this makes world dungeons more interesting. Their appearance is dependent on more subtle world conditions, defeating them can have subtle world effects, and leaving them alone can also have subtle world effects.

Finally, the Corruption mechanic could tie right into this dynamic wildlife, by (what else) corrupting it. Corruption could send its tendrils into that boar dungeon, and it might start spawning corrupted boars in the area: tougher and more aggressive, desiring to spread Corruption as far as possible.

Furthermore, a corrupted dungeon within X distance of a faction town could have innate negative effects on the town, thus spawning more meaningful faction missions.

Again, I think the above framework transcends PvE or PvP, and provides a means to make both more meaningful.

At least in the open world, am hoping for ecosystems, with cause and effect (kill the apex predators, and the bunnies go wild, etc.).

Would be cool to see lairs that only spawn if certain conditions are met (too many bunnies? a killer rabbit dungeon spawns! ).

The more I play Alpha, the more the attribute system feels out of place (for reasons already described here). I'd consider the following:

• Use Albion's "you are what you wear" system, such that all gear innately provides attributes.
• Varying races get an innate multiplier to certain attributes, or just flat bonuses or penalties.
• Merge attributes into the talent tree system. Maybe even have unique racial talent trees (my favorite option! ).

Mainly hoping to be part of a good sandbox MMO from the start, and Fractured sounded very interesting.

Horizontal progression: very curious to see how that works in practice.

@Whisper

Good question! If I had to solve the problem, I'd look at the following:

• Logistics. Make it hard to project power, and easy to defend the home/town/castle (which has the advantage of being true to RL).
• As others have pointed out, limit guild and alliance sizes: or make them progressively more costly to maintain (again, representing a kind of logistics).

Continuing the above thread, one inherent aspect of MMOs that's foisted on developers is instant communications across the MMO world: it's like FTL comms everywhere. In RL medieval settings, the communication lag across massive distances would make unification far more difficult.

Representing that by hugely increasing maintenance costs for bigger guilds/alliances seems reasonable: "bigger" meaning more members and/or more territory controlled. (You don't meet your payments, your alliance disbands!)

@GamerSeuss said in Alternative to crafting and enchanting RNG headache.:

@Roccandil Actually, to serious players, neither Chess nor Go are considered games, they are considered Strategic Thought Exercises. They get sold/marketed as games, for sure, but their lack of any Random element pretty much precludes them from being real games so much.

The Word 'Game' does include a lot of subsets, including puzzles, activities, and simulations, but when you really come down to it, an actual game needs an element of chance.

LOL. How was your latest tactical culinary exercise?

@GamerSeuss said in Alternative to crafting and enchanting RNG headache.:

@BlueGoblin actually, RNG is pretty much what makes most games, GAMES, as opposed to just activities or puzzles. Boardgames have dice, Cardgames have the shuffle, Skill games have the regular chance of failure in any skill-based activity. Success means very little if there is no chance of failure, and thus, RNG is what makes a Game a GAME!

Chess and Go would like to chat...

RNG may be a game for some people, but not everyone (and most certainly not me!). I like games that are built on simple, deterministic rulesets, that allow emergent outcomes.

For me, RNG is just a form of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, looking for a different outcome, and I don't enjoy that. It makes thinking far less relevant.

@GamerSeuss said in Alternative to crafting and enchanting RNG headache.:

Won't happen!

Games, especially MMORPGs, rely on situations such as you describe in order to drive their in-game economy. RNG fickle results are part and parcel of the MMORPG experience and it is highly doubtful that any MMORPG developer would shoot themselves in the foot metaphorically speaking by removing the RNG aspect of the game for increasing resource costs. Yes, to the individual player/crafter, it might seem like a win-win situation, but for overall game longevity, such a move would produce a death knell.

This is not to say that Fractured won't adjust the RNG variables, and keep refining their RNG seed engine to get more randomized results, it just means you'll never see the system you propose taken up by any MMORPG wishing to have a chance at long-term success on the market.

RNG is a crutch, and thus an opportunity for an MMORPG to attract customers by replacing it with a better system.

Furthermore, RNG is not required to provide resource sinks: that's a fallacy. Over the long haul, RNG averages out; all RNG really does is cause some crafters to fail more and others less.

And since humans remember failures more than successes, that inserts a kind of poison into the gameplay that builds up over time, eventually causing players like me to leave (I've seen this pattern in myself, and I'd be surprised if I were one-of-a-kind).

I much prefer deterministic crafting.

On harbors, what if you could select slow travel, at a much cheaper cost? That way you could move a lot of goods efficiently (which is historically and realistically accurate), but not instantly (which isn't).

The way I see it working, you cart/wagon your stuff to the harbor, select slow travel, and then you get an in-transit timer on the toon (maybe in the hours, depending on how far it is).

Since we all get more than one toon, at that point you just switch to playing on a different toon while you wait for the voyage to finish.

@MeruemVBP

I agree; there's too much decay/chores in the game.

Albion's system works very well: items have a chance to be destroyed when you die in full-loot PvP. I like that, because those who died in full-loot PvP don't care that some of their stuff trashed, and the looter is happy to get something. That economy works very well for crafters!

Gear still takes damage (generally from a PvE knockdown), but can be repaired in cities with currency, so it acts as a short-term punishment for too many PvE knockdowns (eventually you have to go home, unless you brought a repair table, which are expensive and a risk in PvP areas). Again, that balance works really well, and is a constant currency sink.

I wish we could repair gear with gold in cities: would be a good gold sink!

Hmm. Instead of buffing warriors, you nerfed mages. Sigh.

That's the second death knell of the game for me (the first being city upkeep). I don't see myself going through the pain to make gear that will decay anyhow, just so I can play for a bit.

The entire game is increasingly failing my risk/reward calculation.

My impression was that Syndesia was supposed to be the faction PvP planet, whereas Tartaros was all PvP everywhere.

My suggestion would be to restrict PvP on Syndesia to faction/city/guild warfare. Within the context of guild wars, PvP should be full loot, wide open, no holds barred. Outside, it should either not be possible, or be heavily penalized.

@Vaiduoklis

I agree with your point, if only because character creation presents new players with choices that can't yet be meaningful to them.

I think it's much better game design to present the choices after the player has had the opportunity to understand those choices in-game (and not expect the player to read a wiki first). That's good game pacing.

As a lesser alternative, allow the player to easily redo the character creation choices once they have in-game experience.

Yeah, I've ditched those as well.

@Kazzier said in Ranged damage feels too high.:

If anything, I would like fights and battles to last longer than they are currently.

I like this, and would like to see it be a design principle. Since Fractured has so much territory, I'd like to see PvP be more about controlling parts of the map than getting kills.