Although I think that the new combat is going to be something that would be greatly appreciated by future players -I believe the unbalances and difficulty of our old combat makes hard for us to "steal" players from other MMOs-, there are some little concerns I want to point out.
I noticed it because The Olympus, the faction I proudly run on Vector, gained a big wave of new players from the big partecipation we are having on MMORPGitalia.it. I and my mates started to train them keeping in mind that we also have to underline that the system they are learning is coming to an end ( well it's a good thing actually ). So we are explaining all the new stuff about how the combat formulas and classes will change and so on. Getting focus back on what i wanted to say: a couple of them installed two instances of the game, and started playing both on the QA and the live servers.
I noticed it because The Olympus, the faction I proudly run on Vector, gained a big wave of new players from the big partecipation we are having on MMORPGitalia.it. I and my mates started to train them keeping in mind that we also have to underline that the system they are learning is coming to an end ( well it's a good thing actually ). So we are explaining all the new stuff about how the combat formulas and classes will change and so on. Getting focus back on what i wanted to say: a couple of them installed two instances of the game, and started playing both on the QA and the live servers.
Those two guys where veteran players that have played a lot of other MMOs ( more than I thought may exist ), and that have been instructed about what is still bugged and what is design driven in the QA. So far they have reached lvl 18. Every day they do a /copychar and visit the QA to test their char on it.
The feedback I received from them in the last days is this: while the overall game, keeping in adeguate regard the bugs, is much better for noobs both in coolness and difficulty ( expecially with the new patches and fixes ), they found some aspects of the combat very unpractical:
-The main issue is that they have to manually activate or set up much more stuff (I.E. the soldier or operative upgrade ). This made the usability of the new system worse compared to the old one.
-They feel that the old interlock combat interface,although too big, is more ergonomic. They didn't say anything about the roll's number (as far as i know the only game in which they are visible is MXO so they weren't addicted to them yet 
) . They just don't like the bars eaten up by the stances ( as many of us including me ).
) . They just don't like the bars eaten up by the stances ( as many of us including me ).And they still don't use the Hypers nor the resistence bonuses of the Awakened tree, that end up eating a whole hotbar just by themselves!
Apart from this, it looks like the new combat felt better in all other aspects of the gameplay.
The influences bonus and so on: This is something weird: they get aquainted with the old interlock in less time than the new one, but in the Live server they mastered only the martial artist's point of view of the gameplay, forcing me to explain how hacking works ( they also asked me WHY the hackers have by design a radically different kind of formulaes, and that was a question I couldn't answer ) . In the QA they took more time, but along with interlock they understood the basic combat/resistences mechanincs for all trees in one wonderful ( for me that I had to explain less stuff
) time.Message Edited by Fade2blacK on 02-23-200607:47 AM
