Suggestions/ideas

[Akhenemhet]

Hi,
Just sharing some ideas from a new player perspective.

WK has some really interesting stuff going on. Explore is really interesting early on although you get punished for exploring by death and massive exp loss, which isn't fun at all. Going from exploring to killing can be challenging to find a spot which suits you.

Most of my suggestions are based on the concept of challenging vs punishing games which is nicely described in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

I do think that WK has some concepts that are far on the punishing side of the spectrum. Maybe they were cool when muds were thriving but I think they are major turn-offs to appeal to new players, especially casual ones.


1. Death
Death is super punishing on Wk. So you lose tons of your exp %, you have to walk back to town, you have death penalties, you have scars. Quite the list of negative effects for dieing. Is it necessary to pile on the negative stuff?

Back to the punishing vs rewarding video. If world of warcraft punished players in this way for death, do you think they would have the playerbase they have? in WoW death is an inconcenience, not a major setback. You get sent for respawn in a graveyard with half health and mana, and your armors take a 10% hit, and there is a resurrection sickness that wears off automatically.

Suggestion: Take example from the world of warcraft concept. Make it more of an inconvenience than a major setback. How about 25% unspent exp loss reducable to 10% by way of player casted resurrection. Make death penalties wear off after 1 hour. Send them to a player city on death instead of making them run back. Something along these lines of make it inconvenient instead of a major life changing event.

2. Reincarnation
Data point: I was talking to Moonshdw today who told me, they have never reinced -- this is a huge red flag! I reinced today and it was an utter mess (it cost me 500k, half of my gold), so I had to reinc again back to Knight, and it cost the other half of my gold. All of the work in the past few weeks gone for a messy reinc. Also a red flag. I could have waited for a player to rienc me for some exp loss instead but even that is rather costly.

Reincarnation is a _really_ fun game mechanic. But the way Wk sets it up, reincarnation is a nightmare.. at least in my experience so far. Embrace reincarnation, make it less painful. Why not? If you mess up a reinc, let someone re-reinc for free for say 8 hours?

If someone like Moonshdw has never reinced, it makes me wonder if they just don't care to reinc, or are terrified of the costs to their total exp, or the money.

Suggestion: Long story short, whats the risk with making reinc easier and cheaper? Embrace it!

3. Guilds are really confusing, to me.
Would be nice if guilds had a quick-start guide on the wiki. Some short but sweet guide saying heres how you should spend your first 200M, here are the skills/spells you cannot live without, here are the ones that you probably can overlook.

Suggestion: Make it easy and less of trial-and-error for newbies. Have players write guides for dummies.

4. Skills mechanics *ugh*
Why do failure rates have to be baked into skill percentages? Newbies have low skill percentages, so skills fail all the time. Vigilance for example, or cure spells seem to be this way. Why not let those spells be useful, fail less but improve as you advance? Its not useful to chain cast cure 100 times for 10 successes.
Also in my experience buffs only last a few rounds at low skill percentages, which is a bummer. Can't they last longer but have lesser effects?
Wk isn't the only game that suffers from this - I just think its a bad mechanic and ruins the new player experience.

Suggestion: Consider new players and the most useful skills. Remove failure rate as a mechanic to skill % and bake in a reduction in efficiency instead. I know this is a daunting task.