Delerium wrote:IMHO there are a few things that need work for the masses to love Salem. Before that, any mass publicity will probably hurt the game.
- Some form of secure trading. Trading in barrels is silly and unrealistic. People can walk up and take your trades in the middle, steal from you, scam you, bait and switch (show you high purity items then swap out for low purity on trade.) Most modern MMO's have secure trade... lets not get stuck in the 90's.
- The stall system needs work.
- Quantity. Right now there's such a small amount of stalls, only the vets have them, and they rarely go up for sale. Why limit the number? The price is high enough to keep the noobs out.
- Bait and switch. When making a purchase, you should get the exact item you see listed. Don't show me an item with one purity value, then give me a different purity value when I buy it. That's bait and switch and a form of scamming.
- As stated, there needs to be some incentives to group and help each other. Just to name a few, player made quests, player made town merchant stalls, and allow player stalls to purchase items as well as selling. Right now, this is basically a single player MMO. Outside of town, people avoid each other like the plague. If the american colonies existed like that with no help or cooperation between colonists, they would have died off real quick. Quite frankly I think this is mostly due to the next point.
- This game mixes two incompatible play styles, full loot perma-death pvp and crafting sandbox. That probably won't change, but you can bet it will be a reason most people will review this game badly. It's way too niche. One solution would be to make a care bear server that has pvp/looting turned off.
Some of these points I would love to see changed about the game, mainly 1 and 2. 3 and 4 are more stated through the eyes of the public, and don't necessarily reflect my personal view. Put simply, I see both sides of the coin on number 4.
The biggest thing is, this game needs to make money and bring in players. People need to feel like they will get some use out of what they purchase with real world money. That means removing the griefer aspects of this game, plain and simple. Until that happens, it will always be just a niche game with a small player base, and bringing in no income.
1. if the game was going to be realistic it would be possible to walk up and take your **** mid trade, but then you could kick their ass, so Boston would need to be PVP and it would be possible for someone to show you some high quality goods and then give you low quality. Both of these things can be mostly solved by not being an idiot, if someone is standing around find a different barrel, if someone walks up then take the stuff out of the barrel and wait for them to leave, and if you don't want to get scammed into buying lower purity stuff then buy from traders with good reputations or exchange goods in small amounts. The big problem is that its possible to log out next to a barrel, wait for some one to start trading and then log in and swipe their stuff, there should be an area around the barrels where you can't log out.
2. They could probably work on improving the stalls but its not really a big deal, at least not on the server I play.
3. There are incentives to group and help each other, even for hermits. There are player quests, I say that I will give you X if you do Y and then you go and do it.
Purchasing with a stall would be a nice addition but really isn't as critical as many of the other problems the game has. This is not a single player game, you will do much better if you work with others and you will have a much easier time staying alive and recovering when you get killed/raided if you are part of a group.
4. Full loot perma-death pvp and crafting sandbox are not incompatible, the only reason I play this game is because it has both full loot perma-death pvp and crafting sandbox gameplay.
And there will never be a care bear server. What would you even do on one? It would become without the treat of other player the game would become boring and you would run out of things to do before you even hit 100 humours.