New player feedback

Desad

New player here. Here are some minor suggestions and some background.

Background: I played MUDs extensively in the past (while in school/college during my teens/young 20s), but not for many years (am now mid-30s). I saw Starmourn launched and decided to check it out — enjoying it so far. One thing that is obvious coming back to MUDs, and IRE in particular, is how unapproachable they are for a casual player. I don’t have the time to dedicate to building a complicated curing system or to figuring out the obscure arcana around afflictions or skills — let alone stay up to date as they change due to balance updates, etc. Decaying cures also meant that I spent an inordinate amount of time just ramping up to be able to do simple activities like bashing. Collectively, this meant that I was never able to get into playing IRE games as an adult, and lapsed into inactivity. The barrier to entry is simply too high.

So, with that context, here is some feedback.

Things that are working really well:

1. I have been very pleased to see Starmourn automate curing, and remove the need for collecting cures that decay over time. I really can’t state how huge this is.
2. More interesting bashing skills (ie, everything works on NPCs). I imagine I will get into PvP at some point, but being able to figure out how my skills work on NPCs is great. Plus side - as a casual player, a lot of my time is spent bashing relative to other activities, so making bashing more interesting is a big plus in terms of game enjoyment.
3. My class (Nanoseer) seems usable with simple aliases using the in-game alias system. This is really nice. In other IREs, I’ve noticed that the amount of command spam that is needed to even use your class offensively is prohibitive and requires a complex scripted system.
4. Web client is quite nice. I’m playing on an iPad with the keyboard attachment. I wouldn’t be able to play without this client.

Here are some quality of life changes I would suggest based on my limited Nanoseer experience:

1. Give us some way to figure out exactly what afflictions do. I didn’t know until reading the Nanoseer thread that I should combine freeze with swarm for increased damage — the AB files don’t suggest it, and there are no help files or otherwise for afflictions. Please add something like this.
2. Be specific about what afflictions or impact skills have in their AB files. “Random mental afflictions” doesn’t help me in this case.
3. In general, more specificity in the AB files would help.
4. LANDMARKS, WALK TO, and PATH — please combine these. I’m not sure when I should use one or the other. Example: in walking to Marle, it doesn’t show up in LANDMARKS, but I am directed via the help file to PATH FIND MARLE. Confusing.
5. Nanoseer specific: Reduce swapping command prerequisites for Oblivion. If we’re not channeling the right Empyreal, have trying to cast a skill automatically swap us to that Empyreal at the cost of sanity if we have the swap skill and it’s off cooldown. This would seem to preserve some advantage for people who actively swap (ie, you can time it advantageously based on sanity gain/loss and to start the cooldown earlier if you know you have an upcoming swap), but would make it more accessible by reducing the need to queue up another command for people who aren’t going to build a complex system. I rely on queue to stack commands effectively, and Empyreal swapping breaks this dynamic since only 1 command gets queued at a time (which I like, b/c I sometimes will spam the wrong one and want to override it).

Desad

One more suggestion:

• ST <target> doesn’t work quite as expected when bashing, and I can’t quite figure out why. Example: if I ST ROCKHOPPER in Marle, it will target some, but not all, rockhoppers. This means I need to frequently reset my target. It’s very odd.

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Desad

Thanks Wuff - had no idea. That is super helpful.

Another weird one for a first time player:

• The 1st person Nanotech Swarm message doesn’t make it clear that it’s doing damage. It just says my nanites surround the target. I wasn’t sure if it was a damage over time, was on a delay and going to do damage later, or what was happening. I didn’t think it had done damage, though.

Cubey

Desad said:

• The 1st person Nanotech Swarm message doesn’t make it clear that it’s doing damage. It just says my nanites surround the target. I wasn’t sure if it was a damage over time, was on a delay and going to do damage later, or what was happening. I didn’t think it had done damage, though.

CONFIG SHOWDAMAGE ON. Should be on by default really, not sure why devs decided it isn't.