Designated monster spots.

[marzuku]

Tbh i liked alpha alot more than the game we have atm, others agree some disagree.

Alpha had a spot where golems of different classes of monsters gathered, a spot with spirits and monstrosities.. a spot with skellies.. a spot with trolls and a spot for dragons..

ATM we have, everything everywhere and its fucking irritating.

a) this way certain "special" monsters wont be special because you've seen all the mobs in the starting area from when you began.
b) Also there are to many just roaming around freely, which is irritating if you want to get somewhere they will block your way and cause enough dmg for you to have to stop and heal or something.
Solution: make some monsters forest monsters, and assign the rest to designated areas where you can grind f.ex "im going spirits, you go adepts, and bob you go look at golems"

Xen had thieves, trolls, imps and bugs in the forest.
Bugs would be in certain spots with several bugs gathering around towns etc for low lvls to start off with.
Thieves would attack you as you were walking on a road(thief wanting to maybe steal you're gear)
Some trolls might have broken free from the rest of the trolls and was attacking strangers.
imps travelled in gangs normally within a forest

TBH alpha was heading the right way, just try to make pre beta more like alpha and then the game will rock.

Btw Bog monsters should probably be close to some bog, march, fen... or the name will mean nothing, alpha actually had these monsters in a march before they where named Bog monsters."hint hint"
you could actually make a Bog monster camp near some shallow waters and the Burning horror could be named Bog monster shaman or something?
you could make different tribes with different difficulties and different colors, which you already have.

suggesting names for different tribes:
Bluegill bog tribe (the blue ones)
Cursed bog tribe: these would somewhat act wierdly (chose a color)

[Joe M.]

Alpha had a spot where golems of different classes of monsters gathered, a spot with spirits and monstrosities.. a spot with skellies.. a spot with trolls and a spot for dragons..

ATM we have, everything everywhere and its fucking irritating.

It has been said before: this is a *temporary* map. We realize that it has its weaknessess, including the one you point out. But please do understand that we can only address one problem at a time, and that there are higher priorities at the moment than making a better map--in fact we had already planned to redo this one a couple updates ago, but had to put it on hold in order to address other, more pressing, issues. We will get a new map before Beta.

[Joe M.]

Re: your "Alpha was better" sentiments.

Yes, Alpha was "better" in several ways than what we currently have. But what we currently have is better than Alpha in about a million different ways which you can't see yet. Alpha was better in certain respects simply because we had a lot of time to polish the game as it was then--don't think we didn't learn from what Alpha did well. The current version of the game will equal and surpass Alpha in all the ways about which you complain soon enough, and you'll start to see all the wonderful things that the new version allows which Alpha could never have handled (e.g., monster "parties"): like I said above, we can only address one issue at a time.

EDIT: p.s., everything I've seen you say along the "Alpha was better" lines is all content-focused. i.e., all what we do with the tools we have. But what I'm saying is that our new set of tools is a lot more powerful than the set of tools we had for Alpha--that's *why* we had to do this. So as soon as we've refined our tools and fixed some basic things, we'll be able to move on to doing everything with these tools that we did with Alpha, and doing all those things better than before.--do you get what I'm saying, or am I being unclear?

[marzuku]

Re: your "Alpha was better" sentiments.

Yes, Alpha was "better" in several ways than what we currently have. But what we currently have is better than Alpha in about a million different ways which you can't see yet. Alpha was better in certain respects simply because we had a lot of time to polish the game as it was then--don't think we didn't learn from what Alpha did well. The current version of the game will equal and surpass Alpha in all the ways about which you complain soon enough, and you'll start to see all the wonderful things that the new version allows which Alpha could never have handled (e.g., monster "parties"): like I said above, we can only address one issue at a time.

EDIT: p.s., everything I've seen you say along the "Alpha was better" lines is all content-focused. i.e., all what we do with the tools we have. But what I'm saying is that our new set of tools is a lot more powerful than the set of tools we had for Alpha--that's *why* we had to do this. So as soon as we've refined our tools and fixed some basic things, we'll be able to move on to doing everything with these tools that we did with Alpha, and doing all those things better than before.--do you get what I'm saying, or am I being unclear?

im sorry if saying that i felt alpha was better made you think that you were doing a bad job, but you arent, im just saying dont forget the stuff you learned in alpha and then develop an entirely new game with all the flaws you've already worked out in alpha..

[Joe M.]

Just making sure we understand each other. Good to know that we do.

[Karl G.]

Thanks for keeping tabs on this Marz; I guess it would have been better to post somewhere "this is a testing map only!" We will definitely have hunting zones, separate out the monsters, etc. At the moment though I was super excited that casting monsters even worked at all and just wanted to put some in-game. If I had hidden them way off somewhere high level, you wouldn't have been able to give me the feedback that they cast too fast to be killable. This is all working out the bugs on the way to our super great map.