Video Review Part 2: The Yakety Saxing

Again, an outstanding job on making the video. Come on folks, at least give it an upvote if you appreciated his work. I'm sorry it required you taking such vast amounts of time to make, it must've been more than frustrating and boring. But there isn't a thing that anyone could argue with, you nail every thing pretty well, and leave open ends for possible future consideration.

As articulate as you are, it's a huge shame that Port didn't listen to you, and so many people. I suppose if the whales are "happy" then it doesn't matter what more intelligent minded folks, actually reviewing and giving vital feedback, think.

I also got a new PC, excellent graphics card, and new router and noticed no changes either. I didn't need a new router to play Skyrim, but that was the issue with SotA. They didn't care enough to fix it. If I hadn't gotten the router, there's no way I could've ever played the game at all. I couldn't stay connected longer than 2 minutes at any given time. Did they answer me or care? No. Never. Other players suggested the new router. That was as far as it went. I didn't pay enough for their time.

Anyway, you've given enough real testimony to the issues with the game, from your 2 videos. Excellent content and reviews. I really enjoyed them, and the laughs. The comedy music, the cow in the bed, and so many other things. I never even knew some of those crafting problems existed because it was too boring to try it long enough to find out more than I already dreaded!

The weirdest thing is near the end when the entire house that I've just been using suddenly pops in, as if it's not been pre-cached anywhere. You'd think they'd apply some sort of priority loading filter when Aggressive isn't on at least... There was so much more I wanted to talk about, but the video was getting huge again!

Perhaps we should make a roving PvP gang and all go in on Team Speak and just freeform our way through the "fun"...

Hey, IM and I were just in the game joking around, killing cows. We have a small cache for you, to do your favorite activity of crafting lol

ha! The guild registrar is upstairs of the bank in upper Owl's Head. It "only" costs 25K to make a guild.

I could help you grind, but I have no armor & no money to get any

Some things I wanted to comment on:

1. I like the idea of the crafting system. Crafting the individual parts and with each giving specific bonuses isn't a bad idea. The problem is, as you show, it's just boring to do. It isn't like UO where you could go to a mine and just do your craft; here, you can't just be a crafter, you have to be a fighter, too, to wade through all the spiders, wolves, wolf spiders and generic humanoids to get to your shitty nodes.

2. The overly simplistic and unimaginative means of mining (or harvesting, in general) makes the natural elements of grinding skills such as mining painful to participate in. Then, you have that "43% chance" to mine successfully. In UO, it was you mined, and you had a chance to proc better ores, but once you hit 50 Mining (which took all of 30 minutes) you were pretty assured to get at least iron 90% of the time you struck the ground. So not only is it already boring, but as you so eloquently put, it gives you as a player too much time to ponder how shitty it is.

3. Y'all know how I feel about combat, so I'll stay off that, but that fight with the wolf was really painful to watch. It brought back memories I didn't want to be reminded of.

4. However, I will say I agree with the idea of NPCs not being color-coded or anything. It's something I liked about UO, where you saw that big fuck-off ettin and thought, "I'M FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED." Then you're like, "Oh, this isn't so bad, I can probably beat this guy." You gave it a shot. and maybe beat him. Then you saw an ogre: "Oh, he's smaller, he's probably easi-EUGH!" It made things feel more organic. I don't need their name in purple or grey to let me know they will instakill me or explode if I fart beside it, respectively.

5. The chase with the wolves was funny, but did that wolf vault the table to get to you? 29:13ish. It might've been clipping, but it looked cool.

6. Crafting mutton should be simpler. Repeated interactions without the need for any kind of attention should be automated; there's no need for repetition like that being entirely manual.

7. 100% player run economies don't really work well. You still need to allow players to make money from NPCs, maybe not as much, but still making a profit. Player trades should come in higher end items as well as bulk goods that are useful, particularly later in your skill level, or selling completed goods rather than ingredients or parts of the whole.

Either way, great video, thank you for the effort, Nemo.

When I first played UO in 1998, I earned my first one-room cabin by tailoring solely. I made more shirts than I could count. When the vendor ran out of gold, you just recalled all over the land to see which vendors would buy them. Some paid a few gold more or less. I reserved selling items like that, or like in Nemo's video, for NPC vendors exclusively. Who would buy a shirt that had no stats and only my maker's mark? No one.

Expensive items, from rare drops or making them with GM skill with stats, were reserved for player owned vendors.

All that makes total sense. Who wants to wade through mounds of useless junk on vendors? If you have a pile of useless stuff, who wants to destroy it (since they can't drop it) instead of getting a fair price from an NPC?

Sure, it's pre-alpha yadda yadda. But it's been this way for 2 years! Yet they freely and liberally handed out craptons of gold to a very select group of whales.

The first 2-4hrs of the game is, fight to train, run before death. Rinse, repeat. Or just draw them to an ankh where you can revive quickly and get back to skill training by death. Eventually skills will come in where you can take out 1 on 1s.

Though this isn't an approach I've ever had to take with any other game.

nemolives - is about time for an R26 update! I hear so much has changed!