The Forum

[quote="BRAINDATA"]Ok I was originally gonna post this in the drop file thread but the more I wrote up the more it felt like a different discussion.. I feel the new player experience is an area in soma that could overall gain the most improvement To do this we need to look at what makes soma fun and addictive.. The main 4 points are Gaining stats and levelling up Getting new weapons and armour to work towards upgrading your new weapons and armour PvP As a new player, you only really have access to 1 of those 4 The goal: find a way of fixing this without buffing the hell out of super noobs / perfect chars. [b]Getting new weapons and armour to work towards -[/b] The drop files on soma are backwards. If you’re killing devil warriors and are close to let’s say hard club, the guy at hoarde shanis is getting hard club dropped and not even picking it up, if you’re at trolls you’re getting 44 dex gear which the guy at raptors wants to use. As a new you player you rely on standing around town looking for a crafter (boring and tedious) or if you get lucky and happen to find someone who gives you stuff. It’s clearly way more fun going out, killing stuff and getting a new piece of gear to work towards [b]Only a fraction of the lower / mid tier weapons actually see play.[/b] To fix this we can implement a –S tag weapon, this is a new base weapon that would still benefit from hard, rare etc. [b]The idea behind this is to buff weapons that basically do not see play[/b], these would only be dropped by monsters. Crafting is great but we wanna get new players out in the field hunting and coming back to town satisfied with their new loot. Weapons to include; All 2H swords BELOW LB – speed C base LB tier – speed D base All 2H axe BELOW LB – speed D base All spear BELOW LB – speed D base All crossbow below psycho – speed D base [b]Upgrading your new weapons and armour –[/b] for new players upgrading is basically non-existent until you’re on BLG / NM to fix this, we need to come up with upgrades that benefits legit noobs. this is a difficult one to get right, I think really we should only be adding lesser toe new upgrade – lesser dragons pills (+1 evasion) MAX 3 upgrades another issue for new players is transitioning from valks / mess / palus to the harder mobs. If during you’re journey to palus you got a load of lesser dragons pills and toe, you’d have a bit of evasion to get you going and maybe a fast-ish weapon. Picture the scene – long hunt at devil warriors, you come back to town with some rare dark pieces (new helm 5~6 def base) couple of lesser toe and lesser DP and some tagged weapons which you can soon use. Sounds fun right? Int items - which the drop file overhaul we don’t want staff of sky , wisdom etc to become rare! Add these to the noob int mobs [b]Example drop files[/b] [b]Devil warrior:[/b] REMOVE Wooden board ADD hard club etc tier weapons / Barbarian sword (just makes sense) - S tag where applicable Dark set with new helm Lesser toe Lesser dp double large liver drop rate [b]Gazer:[/b] ADD staff of sky and wisdom [b]Palus[/b] REMOVE potions all staffs and weapons all armour and shields ADD shadow set with new helm Lesser toe Lesser dp big buff on drop rate herb frog ll Palus shell (bone for crafting) PvP – this isn’t a new idea, but tiered events SS instances lvl 1 – 20 , 21 – 40 and so on a dedicated PvP event for new players? Other stuff – More bones in game – I don’t think adding the LB tier weapons to all the VOD mobs is a good idea and something Dan would get behind. A better solution would be that during your noob journey you collect a ton of bones Bone of the beast (put on all mobs which beast in their name and beastly noob mobs) Palus shell add cloudy bone to more mobs [b]The point of this post is to get across the fundamentals[/b] If the community and GM are on-board with these ideas then we can work on specifics.. [/quote]

[quote="LUPISCUS"]+1 ..all sounds good to me.. and enable the lesser toes/dps. mayb even lesser keeneyes to be used for upgrading with 50 wep/arm/access skill .. help the newer guys get into the upgrading earlier[/quote]

[quote="MISERICORD"]Double Post [/quote]

[quote="MISERICORD"]Very nice ideas Brain. A lower-end monster drop rework would be very useful to all those getting going on the server and for the most part, could be contributed by and proposed by the community and tweaked by Dan if they look a little OP. A nice solution to the large liver drop increase from DW's would be to allow them to fall under the same drop rule as potion ect, fall in a QTY of 1-3. Nice and simple. The new 'noob' upgrades would be a very nice addition and give a nice flavour of the later game - i'd suggest they followed the same DIY upgrade rules as RDT, ToW ect - this is solely because as a new player you may or may not have established connections in the game with anyone, let alone crafters of any skill. Even so, handing over items to someone when you've only been playing the game for a short period of time is open to scamming 'oh no, it failed' - the DIY aspect to these lower items removes that. There's even a case to be made for shifting down the unused upgrade items such as Devil Pills and groomy tablets into this category as no-one ever uses them; but i'm sure using them would be quite fun for a new player. Bringing more bones into play - An enhancement of the disassemble system could be used here - Add in the Apus~stinger tier to the system and then any crappy untags or unused items could be broken down into a material of choice at a QTY relative to its craft recipe. Most people would obviously choose bones and if a say 35% return rate relative to recipe was in play, you'd get 5 bones from an Apus Bow, 6 from a Raptor Knuckle, 6 From a HoM ect. I know stinger tier has no recipe (as of yet) but just maybe a plain +X amount to the previous tiers recipe would suffice. This would act to add a value to untags & undesirable tagged items whilst also bringing more bones into the game which would encourage people to use bones to craft other top end weapons aside from Apus Bows. [/quote]

[quote="DEIMOS"]The biggest issue I see hsoma side is any genuinely new players or even old esoma folk playing this server for the first time wont know about 'super chars' with endless hours of afk healing and punching bugs from level one to the +50 str dif to gain better stats Imo that removes the fun and if said new player knew nothing about it they would have fun playing to start with just to find they're way off the pace and realise they wasted all their efforts? You shouldn't need to have 2 chars with the first v.high level and tank for yourself just to get ahead in the game, just seems broken - much like dsoma punching but at least that came at the cost of your main stat, and was 'realised' to be an issue and removed from game along with the 50 stat bonus gains system which the GM's themselves had said complicated everything[/quote]

[quote="SUBXERO"]Great idea If its possible for a gm to outsource this to a player to sort this could be huge[/quote]

[quote="CAPPILIO"]I have no idea if this would cause issues or not, But from experience i recently got my 6 Year Old son into soma, it was great it was like watching me 15 years ago with all the excitement and wanting to play all the time and get new armors and weapons. He was so excited by reaching new levels and fighting new monsters, But i was constantly getting, "Dad, what weps/arm can i have and, where do i get them" My Soma knowledge isn't the best anymore so many changes, and i only play off and on for the last few years, luckily the armory helped alot. But he would have so much enjoyment if the arm/wep he used was dropped by the monsters he killed most of the time that's not the case, and il have an hour where i have to login to his account and run around looking for npc's / crafters etc he made it to around level 45ish i think and his enthusiasm is starting to fade, which is gutting because i hoped it would last all the years its lasted me! So i think anyway to get new players engaged for longer periods is a huge plus. I think its already come a long way since Esoma in this regards. [/quote]

[quote="LUPISCUS"][quote="DEIMOS"]The biggest issue I see hsoma side is any genuinely new players or even old esoma folk playing this server for the first time wont know about 'super chars' with endless hours of afk healing and punching bugs from level one to the +50 str dif to gain better stats Imo that removes the fun and if said new player knew nothing about it they would have fun playing to start with just to find they're way off the pace and realise they wasted all their efforts? You shouldn't need to have 2 chars with the first v.high level and tank for yourself just to get ahead in the game, just seems broken - much like dsoma punching but at least that came at the cost of your main stat, and was 'realised' to be an issue and removed from game along with the 50 stat bonus gains system which the GM's themselves had said complicated everything[/quote] The making of a 2nd or subsequent character to use as a tank, is a bonus for having spent the time levelling character number 1. Its just progression of the game utilising the hard work youve done. It's not like any1's 1st character is a 'supernoob'. The making of character no.1 is something every1 has to do, and a few improvements to that experience can only be welcome. Remeber too, the introduction of freemode has enabled new players to get better stats than all the ppl who started at the beginning of the server. The server has been speeded up a few times..lev90-100 speeded up. As regards healing to 100 int.... i doubt if more than a handful of ppl have got anywhere close to 100 .... after 60-65 int..its a serious task to go higher.[/quote]

[quote="MISERICORD"][quote="DEIMOS"]The biggest issue I see hsoma side is any genuinely new players or even old esoma folk playing this server for the first time wont know about 'super chars' with endless hours of afk healing and punching bugs from level one to the +50 str dif to gain better stats Imo that removes the fun and if said new player knew nothing about it they would have fun playing to start with just to find they're way off the pace and realise they wasted all their efforts? You shouldn't need to have 2 chars with the first v.high level and tank for yourself just to get ahead in the game, just seems broken - much like dsoma punching but at least that came at the cost of your main stat, and was 'realised' to be an issue and removed from game along with the 50 stat bonus gains system which the GM's themselves had said complicated everything[/quote] A few things about that: I quite like the +50,+30,.. stat system in a way - It rewards the hunting of harder mobs whilst getting slower stats for an efficiency bonus which adds an interesting dynamic to the game and worked perfectly well for the first gen chars. The problem comes when the second and third gen Chars have come around with tanks on tap and top flight gear that make this process blisteringly fast. I do agree about the Con thing being balls thought, the only suggestion i could make about that would make con the only stat able to get in freemode as it is solely based on number of hits anyway. This would mean it could be done at any point, if you can be arsed, with zero negative impact. The int healing thing i do feel is a bit of a problem, but not massive. There's a post around here from Qiang detailing what the end game effect would be on stats for someone who has healed to 100 int v.s someone who hasn't and in all honesty, it doesnt seem huge deal. [quote="QIANG"][sic]You could heal to 100int and be capped at that with 168dex 156str doing +50str mobs If you didnt heal for int but did int mobs to 100 you'd be roughly 6 stats less than someone who did heal [/quote] If 6 stat points is all i have to sacrifice for not having to heal for 24/7 for literally months and months then i'll take that all day - I feel you could do something so much more productive for your gear development if you spend that time actually playing the game that it'd be practically negated. One thing i would say to that is even the first gen chars able to stay relevent in end game PVP ect, just look at guys like Ganon. I see these things as adding replayability to the game, sure you certainly dont have to do these things, but it will help if you do.[/quote]

[quote="JACKELPUP"][quote="BRAINDATA"]...The drop files on soma are backwards... [/quote] I always wondered why that was? It was the same on Esoma too (obviously). Does anyone understand the original rationale for it? 8) Jac [/quote]

[quote="SOMAWIZARD"]As far as I know the issue became aparrent from the war of the world's patch. Remember there was no bone or apus level weps untill then and the incentive was the win conti to get access to these items and I admit it did make the game somewhat fun. Drop files were never right even before the patch as some have pointed out that drops for alot of mobs aren't relevent. I think they got modified after the patch e.g apus dropping apus bows but it stopped at that. It's been long overdue a drop file rework and now all the existing playerbase knows the 50+ route they are leaving mobs earlier or not even hunting them at all.[/quote]

[quote="SAL3M"]Whenever anybody brings up the fact +50 & the need to level two characters is clearly a broken game mechanic we always hear the reply, 'Yeah it is a reward for time spent.' To me this is a totally moot point. Everybody understands that it is a reward for time spent; the issue is do you want to change the game to make it more accessible to new players who don't necessarily want to invest a year or more of time before they can compete or do you want to cling to your advantage for hours spent on +50? From my point of view boosting UC is the most critical issue, maybe anybody who has already invested in a +50 char can be given some special item or condolence prize to recompense them if the system is abolished.[/quote]

[quote="LUPISCUS"]if the +30-50 mob bonuses are removed ..then every1 would have virtually identical stats and it would become a gear - only game ...and with a few 'lucky' people already in possession of this .. would render the game worthless to play, or on the same par as many other games of this ilk.. You can knock up a qwik lev 100 in 4mnths or less np .. in fact only need to go lev 80-85 ish to have urself an effective tank if u chose that method. ( with a few rested pots .. i made my last guy lev1-110 in 9 weeks )[/quote]

[quote="JON"][quote="LUPISCUS"]i made my last guy lev1-110 in 9 weeks )[/quote] Teach me the wayyyy! Drop file needs rework, same for dsoma. EGF should drop diabolist and not demonship etc. Most annoying in Hsoma is dark/shadow armour drops don't seem to exist when you need them. They should be added to DW not just the pads. [/quote]

[quote="HOGAN"]+1 to drops being made relevant. Would also be good if the drop table could be exported for a player to do if the gms are busy. (not seen a gm post in a month so are they even here?) [/quote]