QOL Improvements for MO2 to increase player retention

[wyqydsyq]

I'm hoping all of this would be addressed at some point as part of project polish, but I wanted to make this thread to raise these things (and hopefully get confirmation or at least acknowledgement on them from SV) which aren't really that sexy and not often discussed but I think are absolutely essential QOL improvements for general MMO/PVP sandbox gamers to give MO2 a chance and not write it off as a janky half-baked beta.

If SV wants any hope at retaining significant players when they eventually push marketing again (Epic release or whatever) this stuff needs looking at before then. Most of this stuff is purely technical low-hanging fruit that even a junior dev should be able to implement yet nearly every player will benefit from, would make great tasks for the new hires at SV to get their feet wet on.

• Trade Brokers
  • Need category-specific filters e.g. picking melee weapons should provide filters for weapon type, head material and core material. Picking trinkets should provide filters for trinket type, metal and gem tiers.
  • Need to show sales volume and price history graphs for a given item when creating buy/sell orders.
  • Default sort by Cost Ascending. Who the hell cares how long the item they are buying has been listed for?!
• Player Housing
  • Needs ACL style permissions so players can whitelist their guild and specific players to be able to enter their house, separately deposit and withdraw from access chests, place/pickup furniture etc without all the pains of manually sharing and managing passwords.
• Guild Management
  • Needs RBAC style permissions so guild leaders can dynamically create roles with specific privileges and assign members as needed. For example guild leaders should be able to set up permissions to recruit, use guild chests, and place keep furniture to be under different roles.
• Social
  • Friends need to be treated as guildmates i.e. special nametag colour, shared clade buffs, no crim flag or murdercounting for accidental friendly fire.
  • Ingame chat needs the ability to manage chat tabs and choose what channels players want to see in them, there should also be an alliance channel with guild and alliance chat available as default tabs.
• Travel
  • Blue priests at cities need to have an option to teleport blue ghosts (dropping any spirit boxes/fluxes) to blue priests in other blue cities with a cooldown (~1hr?) and forced home priest set at the destination to prevent abuse. Forcing players to waste time ghosting or riding naked across the huge map if they want to meet up and play with people in another city is bad game design and provides no emergent gameplay. All it does is leave new players who don't have an alt in every city feeling alienated and excluded when their friends are playing alts on the other side of the map.
• Flagging
  • There needs to be a visual indicator for criminal actions enabled/disabled so you don't have to always open the settings menu to check if crim actions are on when a fight starts.
  • There needs to be the ability to bind a hotkey to toggle criminal actions enabled/disabled so you don't have to frantically open the settings menu after you swing at someone and nothing happens because you forgot you had crim actions off and they were blue.
• Inventory
  • All editable inventory windows (bank, player chests, player inventory) need buttons to quick-sort the contents. Manually sorting inventories in MO2 is an absolute pain and the way stuff gets jumbled up when unequipping/right-clicking ruins any manual sorting you do over time regardless of your efforts to keep things organized.
  • Game needs to visually indicate the "active" inventory windows to reflect where items will go when right-clicking and allow selecting target windows by clicking on them, this also opens the window for a "transfer all" convenience function.

 

[Emdash]

I don't feel like doing anything but camping your post atm.

Trade Brokers: also need 'sets' for armor. Selling bags was kinda trash, imo, but being able to sell a set of items, you'd think they would be able to do that by now. You could get armor set, food set, gear set, w/e. Horse armor and bags, so many combos! 99 cent menu.

I also think they should keep track of who is listing and selling the most and, at least, have it in them separate. Could do it weekly. Featured merchants! Could even do by category. People have stagnated (shouldn't be used like I did but lool) the Bakti economy, for instance, by placing all of these high price items that just sit. It's unhelpful for nubs. SHIT if you wanna go there, add in a recently reduced where you can relist the same item for less money and then have a sale section. I mean... looks at computer clock, it's 2022. We could have these things!

Social: I dunno if I'd go for friends per se, but I would def have a category of friends that could be allies, yea you could exploit it, but at least not every friend would get that priv. I don't have any friends - cries - so I'd prefer it to be named, people I can hit without going grey!

Travel: I am still of the DELETE THE ETHERWORLD camp. Completely nonsense mechanic. Been ghosting since MO1 from tindrem. You have nfi how many chars I rolled and ghosted Tin->Bakti to test soph back when the only way you could test was eat before reset. It's garbage. I don't understand the abuse of your body being somewhere. You need to access your bank to do anything, or maybe someone could bring you some gear, but popping out of a priest, is totally cool IMO. I dunno why it can't just show some facsimile of MOMap and you pick your own priest to res at. I thought home priest was kinda care bear, but if they're gonna do that, just make it so you can res anywhere. I mean, 800 is fast, but it's not nearly fast enough, and it's just creating lag w/ all that bubbly shit in the background.

Flagging: It'd be nice to have crim actions 'off' work in TOWN and in GRAVEYARD. lol those are the only times I turn them off. Or if I'm feeling spicy I'll just go see what's up and if someone wants to BB me then... - shrug - That's really all I want. If I am skilling on someone (imo so FUCKING WACK, not on your list, but the fact you can't skill on a dummy is SO FUCKING WACK. Did I say SO FUCKING WACK yet?) Because of that, if you wanna do a lil skillin or duel or w/e you need that flag off in town. V rare that I get caught with crims off, but it's always the worst time haha.

also toggle key, yes.

Inventory/boxUI: I really don't understand why they put the action box behind all the other windows. It should be much less of a grabass to transfer things from inv-->bag-->bank. It should do like... top 2 windows transfer between each other. My banks are basically full everywhere I've spent decent time. Def needs a better way to navigate. Wep rack, armory, etc, would be NICE. Right now I just take all the bags out and dig like it's Christmas. Def a chance for more disappearing shit, but being able to access all weps, all armors (even like armors as a suit, save you time lookin for that left arm...) would make it a lot easier to regear. Now that you can see what most of the stuff is, it's almost better to store sets in the mail.

 

[wyqydsyq]

Trade Brokers: also need 'sets' for armor. Selling bags was kinda trash, imo, but being able to sell a set of items, you'd think they would be able to do that by now. You could get armor set, food set, gear set, w/e. Horse armor and bags, so many combos! 99 cent menu.

I think a good solution down the road would be a "loadout" system (similar to what AO implemented a while back) where you can save your favourite loadouts then quick-buy them from the trade broker and quick-equip them from your bank. That would be a fair bit of work to implement though and I think at least having a way to filter to the materials and design in the trade broker would allow you to pretty quickly buy a matching loadout by changing just equipment type/slot filter.

Travel: I am still of the DELETE THE ETHERWORLD camp. Completely nonsense mechanic. Been ghosting since MO1 from tindrem. You have nfi how many chars I rolled and ghosted Tin->Bakti to test soph back when the only way you could test was eat before reset. It's garbage. I don't understand the abuse of your body being somewhere. You need to access your bank to do anything, or maybe someone could bring you some gear, but popping out of a priest, is totally cool IMO. I dunno why it can't just show some facsimile of MOMap and you pick your own priest to res at. I thought home priest was kinda care bear, but if they're gonna do that, just make it so you can res anywhere. I mean, 800 is fast, but it's not nearly fast enough, and it's just creating lag w/ all that bubbly shit in the background.

I personally like the ether and how they tied death/respawn mechanics with a magic school. Either way there needs to be a better way to get your character across the map without any items, especially with how sparse content and the playerbase is currently.

Inventory/boxUI: I really don't understand why they put the action box behind all the other windows. It should be much less of a grabass to transfer things from inv-->bag-->bank. It should do like... top 2 windows transfer between each other. My banks are basically full everywhere I've spent decent time. Def needs a better way to navigate. Wep rack, armory, etc, would be NICE. Right now I just take all the bags out and dig like it's Christmas. Def a chance for more disappearing shit, but being able to access all weps, all armors (even like armors as a suit, save you time lookin for that left arm...) would make it a lot easier to regear. Now that you can see what most of the stuff is, it's almost better to store sets in the mail.

Yeah that's basically what I was suggesting, visually indicate the 2 most recently used (moved/clicked) inventory windows (whether that's player inventory, bank, pet bags, bag in the bank or whatever) and have right clicking consistently move between the 2 "active" inventory windows. Currently there's no clear visual indication where items you right click will go and right clicking behaviour doesn't seem consistent when you have >2 inventory windows open.

 

[Kaquenqos]

These are all sensible/good changes.

Personally I think 'flagging' could use a lot more work than you've described, and 'reputation' and 'criminal debuffs' could use their own header, but what you've described is at least a start.

 

[Albanjo Dravae]

Yeah for broker, sell bags with ítems inside si You don't have to sell individual ítems only. Same as fixing gamebreaking bugs.

When i kept suggesting housing personal/group control i imagined a simple whitelist/privileges feature to make things absolutly controlable, i'd say even have chest logs like many games do just so GMs can actually navigate bugged storages. It took em like 5 months to add passwords to houses :S

Same as for guild privs, that for each rank you can choose which things can be done, interacting with guild assets, recruiting, kick, and all the possible emergent privs.

UI rework entirely, to scalable and arrangeable. Chat opacity, and any sort of UI player discretional design change, same as for hotbars, change their shape etc.

Inventory, its really important to add sort ítems, inv, banks and chests, move all in/out, move in/out stacked items.

But lets be honests here SV is so stupid they copied a buggy storage system from another game :S idiots.


Agreed on the blueblock feature, thats a must.

Idk if i want friendlist to have a special color tho, i like that theres no more names coloring si it preserves the remaining diegetic concept.

Travelling is definitely a problem, Henrique is a moron if he espects to balance zerg gameplay with no ghost teleport. Ghost or naked horses travelling time is complete trash for this game and they need to take their heads off their ass and realize that doesn't improve the quality of play time yo anyone. Such simpletons.


Great suggestions, i'd say most if not all have been asked since MO1, because everything thats today ingame is implemented like a lesser version of the previous game.
Players been asking for these kind of improvements not gonna lie, for more than decade lmao.

 

[Albanjo Dravae]

These are all sensible/good changes.

Personally I think 'flagging' could use a lot more work than you've described, and 'reputation' and 'criminal debuffs' could use their own header, but what you've described is at least a start.

I think he ment basic quality of playtime features, not really content problematics or lack of design. I don't think the flag and law system will get any better i think they gonna keep trying to balance the garbage that it is, because SV never aknowledges what they do is placeholder poop, in their eyes that feature is Gucci.

 

[Kaquenqos]

I think he ment basic quality of playtime features, not really content problematics or lack of design. I don't think the flag and law system will get any better i think they gonna keep trying to balance the garbage that it is, because SV never aknowledges what they do is placeholder poop, in their eyes that feature is Gucci.

Yeah, I definitely see these as 'basic quality of life' type changes rather than game design changes. Most of them are good ideas as far as that goes.

I definitely think the PvP mechanics need an overhaul, though. There's a reason threads lamenting the PvP mechanics are constantly coming up no matter where you go that discusses the game. Seems like the worst of both worlds, since seasoned RPKers and new players alike hate the current mechanics.

Saying "well don't play the game then if you don't like them" is not a conductive response to complaints, because quite frankly that IS what most people have done and will do.

 

[Doom and Gloom]

Have they even fixed the broker's listing time remaining bug yet? Last time I checked which is a while ago it was still determined based on the date you made your sale offer, not what selling time you selected. If it's still not fixed it's quite something as it's been since launch and that is really not difficult to fix.

 

[Najwalaylah]

• Player Housing
  • Needs ACL style permissions so players can whitelist their guild and specific players to be able to enter their house, separately deposit and withdraw from access chests, place/pickup furniture etc without all the pains of manually sharing and managing passwords.

Good suggestions for these options, if kept separate. Not sure I'd want my whole guild re-arranging my furniture.

 

[Lashaniqua]

Good suggestions for these options, if kept separate. Not sure I'd want my whole guild re-arranging my furniture.

STOP IT! You know in your heart that keys are the answe. i want something to steal

 

[ArcaneConsular]

Yeah having to travel for two hours is only fun the first time. Everytime after that it gets significantly more annoying

 

[wyqydsyq]

Good suggestions for these options, if kept separate. Not sure I'd want my whole guild re-arranging my furniture.

Yeah basically suggesting you should be able to whitelist specific guilds/players to do different things in your house. Like maybe give your whole guild permissions to enter and deposit stuff into your access chests, but only give your most trusted friends permissions to withdraw from access chests and place furniture etc

 

[MolagAmur]

Not to be a debby-downer here, but there are 100s of posts like these...and we don't get anything back from Star Vault.

Imagine actually getting on the forums and seeing a post from a dev with a list like this of things they are wanting to do for their game. Shit, even just seeing them post on these threads and discuss with us like they used to on the MO1 forums would be huge.

Instead we get streams of Henrik talking about boats and the new continent.

 

[ThaBadMan]

Not to be a debby-downer here, but there are 100s of posts like these...and we don't get anything back from Star Vault.

Imagine actually getting on the forums and seeing a post from a dev with a list like this of things they are wanting to do for their game. Shit, even just seeing them post on these threads and discuss with us like they used to on the MO1 forums would be huge.

Instead we get streams of Henrik talking about boats and the new continent.

Dont forget his circle jerk fanbois feeding him questions about the same shit every stream great content!

 

[Albanjo Dravae]

Dont forget his circle jerk fanbois feeding him questions about the same shit every stream great content!

Some goofy motherfuckers asking Henrique whats the color of he's underwear, thats the summary of all the streams.

 

[Najwalaylah]

Dont forget his circle jerk fanbois feeding him questions about the same shit every stream great content!

How can I forget? Without regard to whom they may be from, he keeps answering them precisely as if he wants to use up the Q&A time on them instead of looking at new questions (if there ever are any). In his place, I would answer none of those questions more than once, and make a FAQ for the rest.

 

[Albanjo Dravae]

How can I forget? Without regard to whom they may be from, he keeps answering them precisely as if he wants to use up the Q&A time on them instead of looking at new questions (if there ever are any). In his place, I would answer none of those questions more than once, and make a FAQ for the rest.

I imagine SV's staff writing down the "good questions" Henrique allways answers lmao.

 

[wyqydsyq]

Thanks for implementing the much requested crim flag keybind and icon SV, hope to see more of these points crossed out through the course of project polish