The Feedback Thread

[PixelLord]

I've seen a rock pile (from a cave-in) and an undead totem move (walk) to a healthstone to get health. Was using arcane swarm as weapon at the time.

[PixelLord]

Started a hunt with 4 NPCs, but it showed 6 healthbars on gamescreen. The two extra ones were from two non-selected NPCs who'd been kidnapped. When the hunt was over, those two healthbars remain on the screen permanantly.

[magusdl]

Characters pre-selected for hunts can't be unselected when they have a issue. Like, a petrified clan member can't be removed from the hunting party.

[Destro*]

Hello everybody. I'm Destro and I'm a huge fan of all of the Shadow's games. I've been following his work and these forums since Din's Curse was released. Now that Zombasite is coming out, and I've had a chance to try it out a bit, I feel that this is a good opportunity for me to give some feedback on my play experience. A bit of a disclaimer, I apologize if any of these issues have already been fixed already, or they are already implemented and I just don't know about how to make use of them (I wrote this post over multiple days, but I checked it over many times so I think it should be fine). I'm still somewhat of a newbie at level 25 on HC. But, I describe myself as a 'super hardcore' player, who wants to play the game on hardcore using a random character + random difficulty modifiers. I don't expect my feedback to have a 'major impact' on the game, but I'm very aware that Shadow is extremely active on these forums, so I hope that this has at least some positive influence on the game.

So, first, targeting + movement:

I'm having a lot of difficulties with targetting and movement in the game overall. Everything feels 'difficult' and unintuitive. For example, I'm playing a Healer + Necromancer on my lvl 25 char. Mousing over a target doesn't allow you to change targets. Instead, you will always target your last target to cast heal on it.

- Add move without attacking or interacting! (I genuinely think that this has to be in the game but I can't figure it out.)
- Toggle off clicking the 'cancel expidition' button. (You already have the toggle off clicking party members which I fell in love with when I saw the option!)
- Border around party member when selected. (You have to move your eyes all the way to the top middle of your screen to confirm a selection atm.)
- Option to always forcable cast spells on the target under the mouse. (If I hover my mouse over myself, cast on myself. If over a status window on the left, cast on that person (mentioned above)).
- Don't move the 3 quickspell slot borders up and down when switching between spells. Just have a border that moves up and down while graying out the nonselected ones. Moving all of them around is needlessly confusing.
- More realistic hitboxes. Every hitbox in the game is slightly larger than the model which makes misclicking very easy to perform. It also makes it impossible to menuvre inbetween groups of enemies. I find myself clicking far away from everything so that I don't risk suiciding into a pack of creatures.
- This next issue is difficult to explain, but I will try my best. When anything is selected, you are 'locked on' to the target for a short period of time. This forces all mouse clicks to be registered as though you are targetting that target, regardless of where you click. This makes it very difficult to impossible in a lot of situations to perform basic techniques like kiting. This behavior is fine for very small minions. However, almost all minions in the game are too big for this behavior to be fine. And, as soon as size modifiers come into play, it is ridiculous. I made a video of this issue, but decided against it. Though, if requested, I can post it.
- Add a self-cast modifier for targettable spells. alt+hotkey, etc. (really annoying to switch between targets when trying to cast spells).

This game is self-described as an 'action-rpg', so I seriously compare it to titles like Torchlight I+II, Diablo 2-3, Path of Exile and all of the old ones like Sacred, Titan Quest and Fate. When I compare the movement+targetting in this game to any of those, it feels clunky, unrefined and almost childish. And, I don't mean childish in an insulting sense, I mean childish as though 'I can't take this seriously'. For example, not being able to free cast abilities without a target is hand-holding to me. It makes it hard to take the game seriously. The same goes for the auto-aim/homing targeting. I'd much rather have no projectiles in the game lock onto targets, while the existing projectile speed modifier is used universally to increase accuracy. Though, I understand that homing/auto-aim is a core part of the game that has been around since Din's Curse and likely won't be changed. That's just a 'dream' of mine.

Party + Minions:

- Ability to dismiss summons. (right-click menu)
- Stop people from attacking doors forever.
- Fix the door bugs. Sometimes more than 1 door spawn. Sometimes infinite doors spawn. I don't understand this. Especially on the top-right (northeast) doors. (Door issues might have been fixed, but I'm not sure. I'm playing a heavily modded version atm so, I haven't had a chance to playtest.)
- At least some way to move your group during a raid. I know they follow you when they aren't fighting anything. But it's really annoying that you have no control over them whatsoever. When the enemies start mass spamming AoEs, or one person gets surrounded by 5 people, you have to abandon the raid.
- Make it so that you can't instantly start and stop raids. This behavior is really broken as it lets you instantly reheal your party and raid again before the other town raids back (which I can do as a healer in my case). I know that the NPCs do it too, but the entire behavior seems weird. I'd suggest at least looking over the implementation again.
- Fix cheese where you can just join the highest level area of a difficulty and grab a couple of party members, and then use them to carry you in lower areas. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I'd mostly suggest not letting people join areas more than five-ten levels higher than themselves. Or, just make it harder to save the people in general (lower starting health, more monsters, etc.)

Quests / Relations:

- Fix bug where 'solve quests' indicator shows on your clans emblem in the relations screen, even when there are no solvable quests.

Villagers:

- Add a new job 'scavanger'. Let people go around town and pick up items and scavange them (would not scavange rare+ items (the yellow ones). When a 22 man raid comes into my town, there are a ton of items that go to waste, unless I wnat to spend 5 minutes scavanging them (which I find myself doing too often!)

Other:

- Add area level to description of areas on full map. (it's shown when you do a expidition, so I can't imagine it's intentionally hidden)
- Undo for salvage. (like rebuy for shop)
- Filter out item types completely. The 'hide garbage items' option is almost useless. I want to filter out all gray items, and realistically most greens that aren't jewelry/rings/necklaces/relics/town defenders, etc. (the rare stuff).
- Let random button during character creation randomize difficulty modifiers. (I'm currently using http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calcul...-generator.php to roll my modifiers. It would be nice to have it in-game!)
- I'm not sure if it's intended or not, but you can get the locations of non-visited areas by taking quests with the 'show all quests' button ticked when chatting with clans through relations. It makes it seem weird that location names aren't shown by default, and you have to accept quests to reveal foreign locations quickly.
- It would be nice to fix all of walls that make movement frustrating. For example, bridges that lead directly into walls on the border of a large open area (tropical jungle is notorious for this ofc) should simply not have a wall there. Also, walls spawning next to transportors to make a 30 unit distance take 3 minutes of roundabout travel to cover, should not happen. Honestly, it would be nice if walls couldn't spawn around transporters within a fixed radius above ground.

Majorly Optional Changes that are hit or miss:

- Some way to earn teleport stone charges on larger map sizes. Or, just give more charges at the start for bigger sizes (would add more incentive to play on larger maps). I saw on steam a lot of people are against this, but I know that this is a core mechanic of the game that is unlikely to chance. A rare quest coming up, killing your nemesis, a one of a kind boss at the end of some dungeons (longer dungeons = higher chance to spawn), I mean anything to help would be great.
- Boss at the end of each dungeon. ("Dungeon Boss", just below nemesis tier). He doesn't do as much as a nemesis/arch-nem, but he could summon reinforcements, monsters and start rebellions to block gates. (also use pots/elixers ofc)
- Buy maps of areas from clans. Don't necessarily have to be completely cleared maps. But, for the villages town, it should be clear. For a wilderness area, most likely never.
- Buy temporary access to a clans teleport gate. (5-10 minutes for 'x' gold) (can't do when enemy obv). Perm access still given with mutual alliance.
- Add buttons for 'quick use healing/mana pot on self' I set them the '9' and '0' slots of my hotbar to F1/F2 personally, but it would be nice to have my 9 and 0 slots cleared up.
- Let me change my 1st slot. I'm not quite sure why this is locked. If you want to attack, you just click on a monster. :>

Recommended hotkey updates:

- I recommend F1/F2 being the healing/mana pot buttons using a potion on yourself. Or, some other button. 9/0 are so far away from the left side of the keyboard, and will just get beginners killed (I learned the hard way ;(). I'm also going to put pause on the left side soonish.
- Recommend mousewheel for quick changing spells (the bottom right menu). Zoom can remain page up and page down. I can't imagine many people value zooming in over changing spells quickly for the mousewheel.

Final Note:

I also think it would be nice to more 'tangible' power spikes in the game. This again goes with the 'APRG' theme. Though, I'll leave this up to your descretion entirely. It doesn't seem like there are many tmes where the game is hard, then you faceroll for a few levels and then the game gets hard again. I can understand for weapon-based classes your damage spikes with a better weapon. But, for spells, defense and many abilities, that feeling is never achieved.

Anyway, that's it! Again, I apologize if I said anything stupid, out of place, or even a bit harsh. I'd like to straight up say right now that I love this game and am nearing the 50 hours of playtime mark (not a crazy amount... yet!). I might have missed some topics, but I think I covered everything in my head from my time playing. Hopefully you will bear with me! In the meantime, it's time for me to get destroyed in my modded out game where every monster is Demigod rank! Muahahaha! (I love how many variables are public and modifiable! <3)

Keep up the great work and thanks for the awesome game!

Edit: Finally got the latest version of the game up and running. I updated my post to remove all of the things that I have noticed are actually fixed and added a few other things that I thought of now that my post is approved and I can edit it.

[MindDefect]

Some nice feedback you got here, could be too late in development for some of these suggestions though...

Originally Posted by Destro*

- At least some way to move your group during a raid. I know they follow you when they aren't fighting anything. But it's really annoying that you have no control over them whatsoever. When the enemies start mass spamming AoEs, or one person gets surrounded by 5 people, you have to abandon the raid.

I don't know why you can change minion behavior but not group NPC behavior. It could have to do with NPCs having personalities that could influence combat behavior. Of course, the suicidal NPCs right now is mostly what makes raids challenging right now, and they could end being too easy to pull off successfully otherwise, possibly to deter picking apart clan members one by one via kite tactics? As these AI clans are kind of basically the main enemies (bosses of ARPGs) of this game..

Originally Posted by Destro*

- Make it so that you can't instantly start and stop raids. This behavior is really broken as it lets you instantly reheal your party and raid again before the other town raids back (which I can do as a healer in my case). I know that the NPCs do it too, but the entire behavior seems weird. I'd suggest at least looking over the implementation again.

If the NPC behavior of being suicidal does not change, making it so you have to wait before pulling out of a raid of could end up frustrating. But I completely agree about being about to just start another raid again asap, there should be a cooldown or I suggested earlier in this thread, that a raid should use about 15-30 expedition points.

Originally Posted by Destro*

- Fix cheese where you can just join the highest level area of a difficulty and grab a couple of party members, and then use them to carry you in lower areas. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I'd mostly suggest not letting people join areas more than five-ten levels higher than themselves. Or, just make it harder to save the people in general (lower starting health, more monsters, etc.)

Never thought of this, maybe limit how many higher lvl NPCs can be to be recruited or something of the sort?

Originally Posted by Destro*

- Fix bug where 'solve quests' indicator shows on your clans emblem in the relations screen, even when there are no solvable quests.

When this happens, do you check if you have any NPCs that have any quests you have finished (maybe without you even knowing..), that you still need to return to them? They will have a "!" above them I think.

Originally Posted by Destro*

Villagers:

- Add a new job 'scavanger'. Let people go around town and pick up items and scavange them (would not scavange rare+ items (the yellow ones). When a 22 man raid comes into my town, there are a ton of items that go to waste, unless I wnat to spend 5 minutes scavanging them (which I find myself doing too often!)

Hear this often enough.. As of right now, in system.gdb I do edit ItemTimeOnGroundMultInTown to 9999.0 to give myself a bit of time

Originally Posted by Destro*

- Some way to earn teleport stone charges on larger map sizes. Or, just give more charges at the start for bigger sizes (would add more incentive to play on larger maps). I saw on steam a lot of people are against this, but I know that this is a core mechanic of the game that is unlikely to chance. A rare quest coming up, killing your nemesis, a one of a kind boss at the end of some dungeons (longer dungeons = higher chance to spawn), I mean anything to help would be great.

Not to have multiple, but there are quests to "recharge" the teleport stone already. I think that's fair.

[Destro*]

You're probably right about solvable quests on NPCs. I'd have to more thoroughly check out how everything works. Next, thanks for the item expiration delay tip. I'm using pause rigorously atm, but if the drops continue to increase, I'll likely need to use that. Last, I didn't know there were quests to recharge the teleport stone. A part of me feels like Din's Curse had the quests too, but that was so long ago. I can't be sure. Thanks for the response MindDefect.

One more random suggestion: Show the durability of an item on the tooltip of the durability warning on the side of the screen.

[Tuidjy]

I very much agree with the concerns about movement. Targeting I've made work, but disengaging is really, really, hard. So hard in fact that I use pausing and unpausing a lot when I have to move around enemies, and when I have to run, I will often simply use the teleport stone (I play only hardcore, as well)

Originally Posted by Destro*

Show the durability of an item on the tooltip of the durability warning on the side of the screen.

Yes, this is an extremely good suggestion.

Originally Posted by Destro*

but I'd mostly suggest not letting people join areas more than five-ten levels higher than themselves.

Please, don't do this. After level 50, I usually create regions at +10 as the very least. After level 75, I create them at 100. If the exploit is all that bad, just make it so that characters recruited in a region do not stay with you if you abandon it.

Originally Posted by Destro*

Add a new job 'scavanger'. Let people go around town and pick up items and scavange them (would not scavange rare+ items (the yellow ones).

I would like to see this as an expedition. Killing the 50-60 enemy clan members at high levels leaves a ton of items on the ground - so many in fact, that even hunting down the set items and artifacts is a pain, because there are too many labels to display. An expedition that melts down everything that's not set, unique, artifact or legendary would be great. The rest would be moved to the player when the expedition comes home. Transmuters and sages would have a bonus.

[Tuidjy]

There are two scenarios that come up pretty often when I trade with other clans.

1) They have no cash, I may have items that they want, but as they cannot afford them, they will not even let me know.

In this case, I keep piling up items on my side, and asking them what would make the deal work. Eventually, they see something they want, and they offer all their cash. Then I remove all but the last item, because it's what they actually can use. I also remove their cash, thus basically gifting them the item.

So, why not have a button which says "Do I have anything you may use, friend?" which would disregard whether they can afford the item? Please note, just removing the check from the existing button will not work, because sometimes, I am not willing to let the items go for free.

2) They have a ton of cash, and I have a ton of items that I am about to melt down for scrap.

In this case, I keep going "Anything you would like?", "Offer trade", "Trade" for way too long.

So, could we have a button that says "Make me an offer for everything that I have and you want."?

[Tuidjy]

I really, really think that the loner should have different rules about what can and cannot be done in the clan seat.

A loner should not lose the region, just because his heartstone is broken. All he should lose is a mean of healing.

No scout or assassin should be able to curse or poison the loner while the loner is outside the clan seat. Poisoning or destroying food is A-OK.

Basically, right now, playing a loner is a lot less fun simply because I constantly have to run back to my town, to deal with serious threats... despite not really having anything of value in there.

I see loners as a sort of Drox operative. They have no real stake but their one life. They are power brokers, and other clans live and die by the loner's whim... but right now, instead of playing the game, I keep running back to town.

What the hell are the monsters going there for? To eat my food? I end up with 200-300 hundred meals by the end of a region, and I should be able to carry a day's worth of food in my pouch. To pee on my grindstones? To roll in my dust of destiny?

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Tuidjy

To pee on my grindstones?

I swear I'm going to add this now. Feralstench has marked his territory by peeing on your grindstones!