EverQuest Next: Landmark - Catch All

garion333 wrote:

Burled wood has been complained about a lot on the forums.

I unfortunately got stuck looking for copper for so long that I gave up on stuff.

Here's my main complaint: I'm sick of holding down the left trigger. I have the same problem with Minecraft. There's got to be a better way, especially with something like harvesting trees because that's about as boring and mindless as possible. Let me lock on and stop holding the button.

Maybe it was bugging out or something when you were looking but on the T1 levels you cant spit without it landing on copper. It's Everywhere.

As for holding down the mouse button I suspect (if it's allowed) that autohotkey will become everyone's friend again.

I would love to get on and show you what I am building. It isn't much (I've had to go tiny brick by tiny brick) but it should give and indication of what is possible at the basic level and I am proud of it =)

Copper was bugging out for me with the stuff that was closest to the portal.

ranalin wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Burled wood has been complained about a lot on the forums.

I unfortunately got stuck looking for copper for so long that I gave up on stuff.

Here's my main complaint: I'm sick of holding down the left trigger. I have the same problem with Minecraft. There's got to be a better way, especially with something like harvesting trees because that's about as boring and mindless as possible. Let me lock on and stop holding the button.

Maybe it was bugging out or something when you were looking but on the T1 levels you cant spit without it landing on copper. It's Everywhere.

As for holding down the mouse button I suspect (if it's allowed) that autohotkey will become everyone's friend again.

I went everywhere looking for copper. My home was a T1 and I spent most of my time looking there. I gave up cause I was getting bored with the jank due to server overload, but once I came back and found copper the servers went down.

Don't think I'll be playing today, server queues are a bit too long and I'll be heading out to watch the Super Bowl soon enough.

Yeah I have been taking the time to post feedback on the forums. Server queues are crazy even if they aren't accurate. (I am sure they aren't)

fangblackbone wrote:

I would love to get on and show you what I am building. It isn't much (I've had to go tiny brick by tiny brick) but it should give and indication of what is possible at the basic level and I am proud of it =)

Copper was bugging out for me with the stuff that was closest to the portal.

there's an unmarked radius on the portal where you cant harvest but not far out everything is fair game.

Same, but I lost it... just got done checking both servers and claim was gone along with all I built. At least I have another flag so I can start over

ranalin wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

I would love to get on and show you what I am building. It isn't much (I've had to go tiny brick by tiny brick) but it should give and indication of what is possible at the basic level and I am proud of it =)

Copper was bugging out for me with the stuff that was closest to the portal.

there's an unmarked radius on the portal where you cant harvest but not far out everything is fair game.

Same, but I lost it... just got done checking both servers and claim was gone along with all I built. At least I have another flag so I can start over

Thanks for all the updates Ran. I rely in you for my MMO stuff. I like what I played so far. Just no patience for jumping servers trying to find a place to plant a flag. Can't wait for them to expand servers.

I got on Friday night and snagged a pretty nice claim in the middle of a lush forest on a T2 or T3 island, then unclaimed when I realized there wouldn't be any T1 resources nearby. I didn't realize how bad the land rush would be at the time or I would have stuck with it.

Logged out and then couldn't log in at all on Saturday or Sunday. Was up early this morning and finally got on again, was headed to the extreme edge of the T1 island I spawned on but on the way found this huge mountain peak in the middle of nowhere that had enough room to make a claim on. So I have a claim half-way up this enormous peak. I plan to make my own mini-Ironforge I guess.

Yeah, that burled wood is a killer. I have 3 out of 5 burled planks I need to make a bronze pick so I can start harvesting iron. I spent an hour whacking every tree I could find and only got enough to make 3. Ouch!

The graphics and the VoxelFarm world though are incredible, really incredible. This has so much potential.

Oh one thing I couldn't figure out, I planted some of my tiki-torches and they weren't giving off any light. Do you have to do something to light them or do they only light at night time?

Gotta click the torches to light them. You can click them to turn them back off again too.

What's the deal with splitting resources with this whole "tiered islands" thing? That just seems silly to me.

Is this phase of alpha always going? Or are there hard dates for when it ends?

My understanding is that as of right now it's always on and they'll be adding in more features. When they do updates and whatnot the servers go offline, so expect that fairly frequently, but otherwise it's going to run until they decide to do the closed beta.

First a Recap of Opening Weekend
· Friday night and Saturday morning was amazing. People were getting in and building stuff. The worlds filled up really rapidly, and we had occasional Island crashes (due to memory leaks). We knew we had to fix the memory leaks right away, so we did.

· Saturday night, we had an update to provide, so we planned an outage to make that happen. We also decided to make some server load changes at the same time. Oops. That turned out to be awful. The server changes we made caused the worlds to buckle under load when players entered the game. And that caused HUGE problems for 5-6 hours thereafter until we finally got it under control about 2pm on Sunday.

· Now (Monday) those changes are stable and people can add into the game very easily. BUT...we still have some urgent issues.

Claims
We overestimated how many claims we thought would fit on a single world. So, now, we have too few worlds for the number of players we have in Alpha.

Solution: Spin up more worlds. As soon as humanly possible. The first such world (Serenity) will open tonight if possible. Tomorrow morning if we run into snags. We are acquiring hardware for more right now and will let you know ASAP when we’re ready to fire them up.

Also, the map and claim interfaces are practically impenetrable with the huge number of claims on a single Island. What looked decent when we had 10-15 claims looks horrific with hundreds.

Solution: We are completely overhauling the map and claims interface to make it extremely easy to understand at a glance.

Details:
o You will never see a Claim buffer again. We still HAVE claim buffers, but they’ll be invisible. You will have “claimable space” and “unclaimable” space. Claimable space is blue, and unclaimable is red.
o This is just a ‘paintover’ of the terrain on the map. No more 3D representations of buffer spaces. Those are dead, dead, dead.
o To place a claim, you just open the map, look for a blue section and go place your claim there.
o On the other hand, your claim boundaries will still be shown as a 3D box. That way you can see where the claim is located vertically. (up in the sky, on the surface, or below-ground)
o There’s a few more nice things getting added since we’re touching it, but those will be obvious when you see the new interface.

· We intend to get this improved interface up and running this week sometime.

So what else are we working on?
PLEASE NOTE: Just because something is not on this list does not mean we are unaware of it. There are many things to improve and add to this game, but this is the list of immediate stuff that we're attacking right now.
•Server stability
o The memory leak fixes helped a LOT, but although they are smaller, there are still other memory leaks. Eliminating those will extend periods of time between Island resets.
•Fixing Templates
o These don’t persist between logins right now. Which is terrible because that’s exactly the opposite of what’s intended. Fix coming ASAP.
•Logout position needs to be maintained so that players don’t login to some bizarre position instead.
•We’re setting things up so that having a tool equipped doesn’t force you to unequip it in order to use a building tool. (Should auto-de-equip instead.)
•A means to get back “inside the world” if someone manages to get stuck outside of it
o Players are using the ADD block functionality to get out of the world. We’re creating a rescue plan for those folks as well as looking into ways to prevent that from happening.
•Invert Y-Axis functionality
o Many folks are used to having reversed Y-axis controls and they get very turned around without it.
•To prevent our voxel database from crashing under load, we are converting it to 64-bit processes. That will make our DB very stable, and we can then ensure that any other issues no longer have this variable in the discussion so we can narrow down any other “voxel loss” issues quickly.
•Bug fixes for a few recipes and salvage rewards
•The 20% resource potion is supposed to last two weeks but wears off when you log out right now. (Obviously, that’s much less useful.) We’re fixing this and restoring the effect to players.
•More character customizations (art team)
•More props (art team)
•More biomes (art team)

Khoram wrote:

I got on Friday night and snagged a pretty nice claim in the middle of a lush forest on a T2 or T3 island, then unclaimed when I realized there wouldn't be any T1 resources nearby. I didn't realize how bad the land rush would be at the time or I would have stuck with it.

I did the same but for the reversed reasons. Started on a T1 but wanted on a T2 or T3.

Not a surprise really. I suspect by the end of the year all new games will be this way.

Hey folks,

It's just not realistic for us to pursue 32-bit OS any longer.

Landmark (and EQN) will be 64-bit OS games *only*.

If your machine is a 32-bit OS and you purchased a Founder's Pack, then you only have two options:
a) Upgrade
b) Request a refund from Customer Service

We're sorry, but it's just not technically feasible for us to pursue 32-bit OS any longer. We apologize for the disappointment should you choose to not upgrade.

I was surprised it was 32 bit tbh. A game like this uses a ton of resources.

Well, ugh.

First, I lost my bronze pickaxe about 30 min after crafting it. All that burled wood, gone. So sad.

Then, I lost all my building into the side of my mountain claim. Saw someone say if you delete your claim, you would get all your props and items back. That did work!

Then, 5 min later I crashed to desktop. Upon logging in, I had none of the items I just got back from my claim, and no claim anymore.

I may wait another week or 2 for things to settle down.

But probably not.

Khoram wrote:

Well, ugh.

First, I lost my bronze pickaxe about 30 min after crafting it. All that burled wood, gone. So sad.

Then, I lost all my building into the side of my mountain claim. Saw someone say if you delete your claim, you would get all your props and items back. That did work!

Then, 5 min later I crashed to desktop. Upon logging in, I had none of the items I just got back from my claim, and no claim anymore.

I may wait another week or 2 for things to settle down.

But probably not.

I'm going into this with the mindset that there's really not much point in being attached to anything right now. It's alpha and there's going to be all kinds of issues and likely wipes so all the effort will be for the betterment of the game.

That said, I'm not sure the "just build stuff" game is going to hold my attention for too long.

I agree in general, except that SOE seems to be of the opinion that everything is going great! when actually it's not really. Yes, it's alpha blah blah blah, but some of the mistakes to date (in only 4 days!) are pretty amateurish, and not representative of a 15 year MMO veteran with dozens of MMOs under it's belt:

- writing data to multiple databases so that they start overwriting each other and become a big cluster-**** - da-wha?
- underestimating server load when the only people in are those that paid $60-100.
- underestimating the difference between 15 devs with plots vs 20,000 people needing plots.

I'm not freaking out or anything, but on the other hand, I'm not just going to smile and say "hey, it's alpha! who cares if 5 hours work just went poof! hehe!". Smed asked for "ball-busting honesty", and Georgeson has repeatedly said we are not supposed to be primarily bug-testing, but fun-testing. Hint: so far, not much fun has been had (by me).

It looks awesome, though! And the mining is great. And VoxelFarm is amazing, but I already knew that as I'd been following its developer for a couple years before EQNext was announced.

I am going to write them an enormous post about the pitfalls of Second Life. I worry that they aren't looking hard enough and thankfully it is Alpha so that they don't fall into the same traps. (they already stepped into a couple of big ones like you mentioned Khoram)

The key thing here is this is Alpha this isn't ANYTHING new when it comes to development, but it just so happens to be exposed. If you were part of the SWG alpha/beta you'd know it's night and day difference from what they once were and what they are now as a developer.

Bear wrote:

That said, I'm not sure the "just build stuff" game is going to hold my attention for too long.

I used to think the same thing, but SWG made me realize I REALLY liked this when there's a purpose behind it. I do have concerns involving guilds and land grabs due from my time in SWG.

I really hope that Landmark devs are scouring all the feedback. I have been giving very detailed and specific suggestions in an effort to stand out from the myriad of complaints. Unfortunately it seems only 6 people have viewed my post but I have high hopes that it is the right 6 people that have dug into the sea of "I want flying now" posts to find it.

Maybe it's not a bad idea to post your super detailed threads/posts here so others who have access can see and +1 them or add some posts to bump them from time to time, I'm not going to be surprised if many people miss on them in the flood of one-liner complaints.

ranalin wrote:

Not a surprise really. I suspect by the end of the year all new games will be this way.

Hey folks,

It's just not realistic for us to pursue 32-bit OS any longer.

Landmark (and EQN) will be 64-bit OS games *only*.

If your machine is a 32-bit OS and you purchased a Founder's Pack, then you only have two options:
a) Upgrade
b) Request a refund from Customer Service

We're sorry, but it's just not technically feasible for us to pursue 32-bit OS any longer. We apologize for the disappointment should you choose to not upgrade.

You know, while I can totally understand them going this direction, I honestly have to wonder how many folks out there are knowingly running 64bit OS, particularly since Windows is still selling 32bit OS. Or is the general consensus that Landmark is niche enough that the demographic is almost entirely on 64bit by choice?

It's where everything is heading and most people have a 64 bit OS even though they don't realize it. Anything sold with more than 4gb has to be running it.

Shifting to a 64 bit requirement just gets rid of the plebes.

The problem is that RAM prices sky rocketed over the last year or more. So a lot of pre-built systems that used to come with 6,8 or 12 gigs, now mostly come with 4. And any system that doesn't specifically say win 7 x64 or win 8 x64 I would not trust it to not have 32 bit (home) installed.

I do think this is a wise move but I know how disappointed I would be if I hadn't recently upgraded my computer...

Well, yay! Latest update added support for inverse-Y axis, and the new Serenity server. I got on before work and pulled up stakes on my old claim, and was able to get something in a lush forest on the new server relatively easily. It's at the top of a rough-looking hillock, but it's got a nice view. Certainly better than the nasty tumbleweed-laden desert areas at the edge of the world that were the only spots before.

Now to see if they restore my lost founder's pack items. And get back to harvesting burled wood...

What is this "inverse Y-axis" business?

Farscry wrote:

What is this "inverse Y-axis" business?

Inverted controls. Pushing your mouse forward moves it down on screen.

Like a flight sim.

fangblackbone wrote:

The problem is that RAM prices sky rocketed over the last year or more. So a lot of pre-built systems that used to come with 6,8 or 12 gigs, now mostly come with 4. And any system that doesn't specifically say win 7 x64 or win 8 x64 I would not trust it to not have 32 bit (home) installed.

I do think this is a wise move but I know how disappointed I would be if I hadn't recently upgraded my computer...

I havent seen a prebuilt from any major vendor with a 32bit OS in years.. certainly nothing recently.

What is the pricing structure for this game? Is it $20 to get in and then no fees?