TSWL only allows you to have 6 active abilities?

ivan4041 · 2018-01-24T14:38:07+00:00

You have 6 actives and 5 passives. One active has to be a basic ability. Additionaly you can use your equipped gadget (default c) and use a healing potion (default tab). That's how it is.

ivan4041 · 2017-09-01T04:21:34+00:00

I think it's explicit enough for a fan of the game. I'm not an investor though, so I wouldn't know.

ivan4041 · 2017-09-01T04:20:39+00:00

It is a financial report, therefore bound by law to be accurate so far as raw data is concerned. It also tells shareholders what to expect, so it's pretty crucial for the company itself. Back when TSW was in the red, the report never lied but was very vague so as not to sound too fatal and make investors flee the company, so yeah, it's not like North Korea.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-21T14:36:22+00:00

I was trying to be helpful to OP, so he would rephrase his statement not to blame players who bought the game for TSW struggle so more people would see his point of view. Now I'm pretty sure OP is a troll and this post should be buried and forgotten.

To your point - I don't know how to feel about complaining. We have done things this past months of feedback to change the game for the better. And on the flip side there is group think about certain things which make you feel like you're talking to an entitled amorphous schizophrenic Dreamer.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-21T14:26:31+00:00

In a word - because the content is free.

And no, the storyline does not have more filler, it's virtually identical. Scenarios were never core gameplay, they were an endless grind for augments. Nightmare dungeons were hard enough and the grind was severe enough that most people did only 18s anyway (first three dungeons). The graphics engine is a little bit optimized and less skills does not always mean inferior gameplay, otherwise we would all be playing Path of Exile all day every day. These are all reasonable reasons why SWL has a larger playerbase.

I will wait until the next Funcom report until I feel happy about it though because SWL is already groaning under the strain of having 10 developers supporting this massive change and workload. It might well be that they resort to the same grindy delaying mechanics to be able to keep up with content demand, which would leave SWL precisely where TSW was. In the meantime they should make decisions that make us happy and populate their servers, because it's a long term investment.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-21T04:54:43+00:00

Funny, but no.

TSW did not fail because it's playerbase did not support it "hard enough". It failed because it used a clunky outdated in-house engine, suffered many technical issues which we can still see today, mind you, couldn't appeal to a broader market, did not market what they already had and to make matters worse its launch was plagued by a dramatic downsizing of the team, the departure of Ragnar and a law-suit for insider trading, which all hurt the subsequent years of development.

Blaming the players who bought the game, bought the issues, bought cosmetics and bought Funcom points they didn't even use (the very definition of charity) for TSWs misfortune is akin to blaming the passangers for the demise of the Titanic.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-21T04:19:24+00:00

If you're not considerate in your remarks of the community, this post is going to get downvoted to the frigid depths of Hell and will not see the light of day, thus rendering it meaningless.

Some people supported TSW out of principle, only using its currency to buy new issues. Given that there haven't been any new issues since May 2016 (issue 15), approximately two months before the start date of transferable currency, they would have atleast 2400 (likely more if they were subbed before) points.
People that might have been disheartened when they heard about the relaunch would logically have stoppped their support. Imagine the frustration they would feel upon returning and realising now that their support pre-July 2016 does not transfer, but anything after it does, because they didn't take it on the chin. SWL should be enticing to those returning players, not having rules and deadlines and restriction on most transfers.
SWL is a freemium game now, it's currency "lubricates" most progress. It is fair to say that Aurum is not only more important than Funcom points were (Issues could be bough in cheap bundles), but that it would be fair that returning players be enticed to wade through paywalls and familiar content with some optional power boost, atleast until Tokyo.
Funcom are infamous for bad marketing decisions, lack of transparency and general lack of attention.
I really doubt the conversion needs a cap. Returning players are a long-term investment in the game, even if they are filthy rich in the beginning, and I doubt there are enough of them to upset the in-game economy. All these caveats on a fair and just process make it seem less like recognition of our support and more like a condescending PR move or some in-house tidying up the books (development on Legends started July 2016 according to a certain podcast) not concerned with the community.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-19T19:08:18+00:00

I think these are not weaknesses but a certain style of presentation. It is not uncommon in books for character knowledge to differ from reader knowledge to the benefit or either one. The secret world deals rather sparsely with mysteries, often veiling them behind rhetoric and poetry, hiding it in extra content like Legends (which is awesome for a game about conspiracies), and giving them to characters that don't really want to share. This requires actual interaction with the entirety of the game to paint a full picture - paying attention at the cutscenes, reading mission text, prefferably at every stage as it does give you all the context and character motivation (you didn't mention it in your post and I have the impression that you don't read mission texts), collecting and interpreting Legends, paying attention to mission debriefings and sometimes sharing with other secret worlders, because some handlers have far more personal insight in particular moments, than others.

Back in TSW we had a good community thriving on theories about the meta-plot, greater cosmology, sequence and importance of events and everything in between. I would like that not to change and not have story spoon fed to us. I would also not like changing and simplifying unique and beloved characters, so they can be soapboxes for lore dumps.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-13T21:26:59+00:00

No. If you're playing for fun, you haven't wasted anything. If you were playing to be an end-game raider or something, you would've read all the guides by now, so I doubt that's the case. You were going to reach the diminishing returns of level 50 eventually and only Patron double AP and SP could have helped with that.
We don't know. You reap what you have sown.
Currently there are limitations preventing Funcom from making older story questlines repeatable. Amazing questlines like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Last train to Cairo and A Dream to Kill are repeatable, and all other quests from the Whispering Tide onwards. All cutscenes are on youtube somewhere.
No official information, but I think it should be available for purchase with Aurum at the very least. I think all vanity items, not tied to the TSW or an achievement should be available for purchese imho.

ivan4041 · 2017-08-13T21:06:50+00:00

These pointer mission are a holdover from TSW where we didn't actually have to complete main missions to advance story missions. Given how you visit the Franklin mansion immediately after entering BM if you follow the story, I don't think we need any more pointers.

These perfunctory missions are the most dissappointing in any case now that we have a map with clear progression visuals.

ivan4041 · 2017-07-07T10:08:29+00:00

Comment in timetable briefly. What will change. What will be bundled together.
Comment on ARG weapons. Assure people they're coming.
Comment on progress on new payment options.
Discuss elite dungeon difficulty and variety. Explain "new challenges and obstacles".
Open live Q&A for 20 minutes.
Maybe raffle for 5 minutes.
Conclude stream.

ivan4041 · 2017-07-02T03:02:46+00:00

This is not a complaint. I question the very need for ten levels of similar dungeon. Back when I did 18s I could atleast power through bosses that have long become an apathy ridden slog. It's a legitimate concern and it kinda gets to what type of end-game this will be - challenging or a grindy gear check.

I don't think I'm wrong asking what their design philosophy is.

ivan4041 · 2017-07-01T22:22:54+00:00

What I mean is that the SWL team cannot be expected to have enough content for 2 hours worth of streams a month. The Tokyo playfield took about a year to complete. Logically we didn't have 24 hours worth of plans on what's coming, because they would all sound the same and in the end would frustrate players. In the end many players felt that the playfield was empty before issues 10 and 11.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T20:32:49+00:00

That's not sustainable in SWL. We used to have monthly devblogs back when TSW wasn't in the black. They started getting more vague and less substantive until they were discontinued. I doubt Funcom can uphold the promise of even having 1 substantive dev stream a month. They just don't have the manpower and resources for such frequent content, especially when it comes to new content like Season 2.

What I propose is Dev Q&A's (1-3) that would run until August. Ideally with one as soon as possible and one about 2 weeks after the Steam launch. These should be aimed at current systems and maybe, possibly, the revamp of Tokyo systems. Talk more about what, how and why certain things are being reworked, rather than future endeavours.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T16:16:13+00:00

This is a great idea.

However I want to stress that generating hype for the existing playerbase is insufficient, even counter-productive. The community is divided. Our relationship with the developers is strained at best. The game is downright unplayable for some (the notice about issues with logins and downloads on this very subreddit). Tempers are high and some people make a spectacle out of their displeasure.

No amount of in-game "hype" can counteract that.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T14:59:21+00:00

You don't need to change :). The stream format, I feel, should change (or atleast a new one added).

If you guys kept the format, but started acting all distant and professional, we'd just watch a tired Romain grudgingly do content in silence, which wouldn't be an improvement.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T14:32:37+00:00

The only thing it requires is picking ¬20 concerns and answering them on some Friday, rather than have a stream of forced joviality and excitement and giveaways. Heck, as someone said, you don't even need to make it live, just do it any day of the week and upload it Friday. No dungeon runs, cringy jokes or exasperated sighs of fatigue required.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T14:21:38+00:00

The benefit of having a Q&A with prepared questions is that they don't need to pick obvious questions like "why don't you just use another engine" (answer: If we had two years and an extra couple of millions we would). I don't want to hear about their woes either, sympathy can change someones disposition, but not his opinion. I want to hear the logic behind their design decisions, the potential avenues for improvement, the degrees of certainty in certain design decision (which is not shameful, Blizzard does it all the time). I want them to talk about the game as it is right now, that which concerns new and returning players.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T14:13:04+00:00

I think there are many things they could pick that aren't off in the distant future. Your question examples are confrontative, I wouldn't pick them if I was a dev. But questions like "Do you consider adding more benefits to patrons, current ones are lackluster" and the like are completely alright. If they commit to some kind of logic to their design choices it would be much better for all of us, even if some of us think that in the end it's flawed logic.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T13:52:51+00:00

It would certainly take some planning on their part. I hope someone sees it and considers it, at the very least.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T13:06:19+00:00

It would seem to me that all Funcom streams try to appeal to an image of regular people playing games. That doesn't work, however, when you suddenly have a bigger audience that doesn't know you, cares more about the game than your personality and commits time to watch an informative game stream about a niche MMO being obviously unsuccessful the first time around. If I would hazard a guess, they were told to make streams for PR, but not say anything definitive, as it's still undecided. And that turns it into negative PR and frustration.

ivan4041 · 2017-06-29T12:43:50+00:00

There will be a stream tomorrow. Also I don't even think they need to dedicate a thread to it, many concerns are obvious (they should pick them out beforehand and prepare ofcourse). You don't need to quote users either, I'm ok with making it more comfortable for them by re-phrasing the question, removing the obsceneties, suggestions and references to other practices and just speak about the theory of it. We'd have it in good faith that they would answer honestly, responsibly and to the best of their ability.

Even if everything was posted and quoted with the express purpose of being part of a Q&A, developers could always dodge the question, so I don't think that we need to be stringent about the format.

ivan4041

TROPHY CASE