User friendliness... (Please forward to devs)

[Sevenless]

Would be interesting if the skills in game at least mentioned what they'd unlock (once we've got a more final list of skills). Would make skilltreeing easier.

[Kaol]

I will add my thoughts:

1. The newbie experience is poor,

a) Yes the text is horribly small to read.
b) Without the custom client the game is completely and utterly ****. The radar feature at least needs to go into the default client asap.
c) Imo new characters should be able to get out into the wilderness straight away, Boston is full of people looking to grief new players in one way or another, it's better you get straight out into the wilds.

2. This is a niche game for now.

The "average gamer" dosn't want to put any effort into a game and they wouldn't enjoy this game never mind the interface.

[Athriaxo]

Thank you everyone for your input on this, I am excited to hear that the devs are aware of some of the points raised.
Back in the days of the Dreamlords (Alpha or closed Beta not sure) I mentioned similar problems but they where not adressed.

Nevertheless I am positive and will stick with the development to see where the road will lead to, hoping this game can become a example of a new idea beeing accepted and well executed even thou this is still a long and hard process ahead.

Best of luck devs!

[Arillious]

I think the devs are aware of some of your points, and if this were a big-budget game, some of them wouldn't be an issue (there'd be enough manpower to fix them quickly and do usability research and all that).

While "Not being a big-budget game" and "not having enough manpower" are certainly valid excuses, these excuses should not be so openly given. I think the marketing of the game is another area that could use improvement.

People don't care why your product has less value, they just care that it does. When you go to the store and are comparing 2 products, do you choose the one that has less features/value because you know the company that made it was able to create that product more resourcefully? Of course not, you just care what the end product is.

One of the first things I look at in a new game is what kind of resources they have to back it up. Normally, you can get a good indication of what kind of game it will be based off that(games with lots of resources can still suck, but games with less resources almost always suck). Salem seems to be the exception to this rule.

I work for a small-medium based software company and we spend a lot of time and money to give the perception that we are actually bigger than we really are. No one wants to do business with a small company.

Salem has the difficult task of having a small development team but giving the impression that they don't. I see nothing to gain by telling people the reasoning that something is not done is because the developers don't have enough resources to accomplish it. While its the truth, it doesn't need to be announced.

In my opinion, Salem will be a great game no matter what. In order to be a successful game, it needs a strong player base. Getting people to play and then play past the first hour is something that needs worked on more so than any new feature.

[Mtibbs1989]

First a few words about me: I am a 26 year old German Game Designer working mainly in the fields of Feature Design, QA and QC on a freelance basis.
I am writing this so (you) the devs get a better understanding on how a new player (who is a hc gamer but no geek or fanboy) feels when he gets into the game and because I want this Game to be a success so more companys will be brave enough to make games based on crafting.

Soooo I just finished playing Salem for two hours... that´s just about as much as I can take...
Heres why:

) The Tutorial has too much writing and even in fullscreen mode the writing is WAY too small even for people with good eyesight.
There really isn't much reason to read the tutorial personally, I did it without reading and now 1.2 weeks later I have a very large settlement and am already building plank walls.
) The Skilltree is overcumbered and not intuitive at all, in fact, nothing seems to be intuitive in this game.
The skill trees are not overcumbered and it's very straight forward on how to play the game.
) Movement feels very slow, boring, even annoying at times... auto routing would help greatly coupled with the option of minimap navigation.
) Having collision detection with other players is fine but not if 10 people are enough to clog a street. If the game goes live and 100+ players are in the starter town this will lead to problems.
This is very obvious, it will be slow when you're first starting out, as you progress through the game and level up; you learn skill that will allow you to sprint and or run faster.
) Theres no way of telling harvested objects from those that are not.
Harvested objects other than maple trees and blueberry bushes show significant differences between harvested and non harvested.
) Resources are spread WAY too thin... this is the Beta and it took me about 1 hour just to find ANYTHING I could use to make a (inspirational?) item.
As you play the game and skill up you learn skills to improve your ability to forage for items.
) Community is a big part of online games and while it might seem like a good idea to have a realistic aproach to the chatsystem in reality it is neither good nor realistic. In the real world you have all your senses to tell one person from another in the game you are down to a single one. Imagine 100 people with the same screenname (???) writing things at the same time in a chatroom.
It's a way to keep yourself safe from griefers who might be looking for your person, I personally would rather have this system instead of a blantantly obvious one.
) Last but not least: Why the strange names, why the complicated leveling system? The game is complex enough as it is there is no NEED for any of those things. I am sure some people like it but that is one out of 100 and on a commercial level this strategy will lead to massive failure.
It's different but very simple to understand in the long run, the game it's rocket science and I have 12 year olds in my settlement who understand this game better than you do.
Dear dev team please consider postponing the release and I would even go so far as to urge you to pull the plug on the beta as the game in its current state will only turn interrested potential players away forever as most people dont give a game a 2nd chance if they did not like the beta/demo etc.

I expect a lot of resistance and hate coming to me from the community now but that is due to the fact that 99.9% of players who do not like the game and have left frustrated will never set a foot into this forum so I hope all of you will keep a open mind when reading this.

Best regards,
Lucas

In the end, you've only played the game for 2 hours. Congratulations, you didn't even put forth effort into understanding the game. Unfortunately, I now understand why the gaming industry is doing so poorly now-a-days. Please, go read what MMO players want. We don't want simplicity and we don't need things dumbed down for us. We want the worlds, not games.

Salem Online is giving this to us this world and if you don't like it, there's the door because this game is not for you. But, please don't push your carebear personality and ideas onto other people. Go play WoW and SWTOR if this game is too complex. This game is almost as complex in character specialization as Anarchy Online and that's what I love and I don't doubt that's what this community loves.

[Mtibbs1989]

Hey guys!

Thank you for your tips but this realy isnt about me not understanding the game its about what I know from my experience to be too much for the average player.
I have seen this happen over and over: The casual player gives a FTP game 10 minutes to win him over, the hardcore player gives it 1 to 2 hours... asking them to stick around for longer would require a very large pot of gold waiting at the rainbow wich maybe there is but that is not communicated to the player in the game.

Additionally while having Tutorials on the Forum etc. is a great thing you must remember that 85% of players will NEVER see the forum AT ALL! If this wasnt a game that I find so very interresting because its all about crafting I too would not have bothered to come to the forum after playing the game and having been disappointed about it.

Regarding #6: While its makes sense that a custom UI could help, again one must remember that I am not talking about me personally but about most common players who would NEVER go thru such lenghts in order to play. A large part of wich would probably not even know there are such addons aviable!

#8 Again you have missed the point of what I was trying to say: A person coming into the game only seeing messages without names will be deterred by this and especially when the game has just launched imagine 100 new players all asking questions and not even knowing who is talking ... imagine having a screen full of people and there are chat bubbles popping up everywhere nobody would even know who is answering his question and if hes actually answering HIS question or some1 elses... example: Player ??? (1) asks: Where can i find maple leaf? Player ??? (2) asks: How to get away from here? Player ??? (3) answers: You need to take the boat! ... now how would player 1 or 2 (remember they are new) know if it was theyr question that has been answered by player 3? So you see in a game without such things as eye contact or sense of direction of sound this system is not aplicable.

The bottom line is you may not want to hear or believe it but I guarantee you from my many years of experience in the gaming industry: This game if not drastically overhauled WILL COMMERCIALLY FAIL ON A MASSIVE SCALE!!!

And let me stress this one more time: There is no use in recommending me to "play longer" because this topic is NOT ABOUT ME it is about the 85% of players who will never come to the forum because they are discouraged right away and never come back!

I don't know how you define a hardcore gamer, but if you only put in 2 hours of effort into the game you're no where close to hardcore gaming. We don't ***** foot in the water. Hardcore gamers dive headfirst into the content for many hours. 1-2 hours would be the aspect of casual and carebear gamers. No offense but don't put yourself into a category you don't belong in.

You would never have seen UO the way it was produced if it was made for players like you. It'd be like WoW or Rift where permadeath didn't matter. Lineage 1-2 wouldn't be as successful and hardcore if they listened to people like you who believed the grind was too much, and the tutorials weren't up to par with your skill curve. No, what happens when you listen to carebears and casual players is Starwars: Galaxies. A game that was one of thee best titles ever created. But, a person like you comes around and says, it's not fair that I have to spend 50+ hours to get the ability to play a jedi. Then the changes happen and it ruins the game.

This is about you, and you're not even coming at it from a professional standpoint. Well, actually you might be thinking along the lines of a professional standpoint, you've got the mindset to dumb everything down like the mainstream gaming industry is doing. So, at least you're on the right track of going and getting hired by EA. Congratulations, you can spend the rest of your life producing carebear games, and leave the indie developers all the good games.

I doubt you've even heard of HnH before this game, just because the game won't be making the money WoW, RIFT, or EVE is. Doesn't mean it's not a commercial success. You don't need massive amounts of players to make it a success. A great example of a massive failure was EA's SWTOR. I'm not 100% sure you know or understand the amount of money that was put into the game. But let me break it down for you. Bioware was bought out by EA for 750,000,000 dollars. The project they worked on cost them roughly 300,000,000. In the end the total net was ~1,000,000,000 dollars. We all know what happened to SWTOR. It failed, and EA's stocks took a massive hit. You don't need large teams and corporations to make these games and it's not hard to produce large worlds. But, instead we get people like you who want to make GAMES not WORLDS. Short lived games for the MMO locust to suck up all the content and leave it to rot.

[MagicManICT]

While "Not being a big-budget game" and "not having enough manpower" are certainly valid excuses, these excuses should not be so openly given. I think the marketing of the game is another area that could use improvement.

I don't see them as valid excuses at any time. They're simply statements that things will be slower to develop and some leeway does need to be given during the beta for flaws

[holleyjones]

i cant see my main in character selection anymore and i wasn't killed at all i logged out at 7 am and when i logged back in it was gone and i ended all the java process after i logged out and quit the game so can anyone please help me i really want to play with my main again i was so far on it too

[Yes]

When you go to the store and are comparing 2 products, do you choose the one that has less features/value because you know the company that made it was able to create that product more resourcefully?

Lol. So. You are saying that the tutorial text of a game that is in Beta stage is hard to understand right off the bat. And you are imblying that these texts are a feature/value. Let me make a comparison then too. Would you buy something you like the taste of which has very brief description, or something that tastes "meh", more expensive, but has a very bright wrap, has appealing text and was marketed "well"? As I understand now, you choose the second product.

While "Not being a big-budget game" and "not having enough manpower" are certainly valid excuses

The excuse is that you don't want to learn how to play the game for some reason.

[JinxDevona]

The casual player gives a FTP game 10 minutes to win him over, the hardcore player gives it 1 to 2 hours.

Not true. I started with the mother of this game H&H. I am so not a hardcore player as everyone here has come to know. It was just as slow going on H&H, but due to what I knew I could work up to, I kept playing. I also don't understand where you get your percentages from. You have no numbers to calculate how many played, for how long, or how many quit. There are many casual and carebear players in this game. We are just smart enough to know that you can't get anywhere in a game like this in a few hours.