144470-the-new-player-experience-a-fun-buggy-mess

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When is the game coming out of technical alpha ?
 
Seriously doe. Just picked up the game several days back and have been having a blast as far as gameplay goes. But...
 
Everything else, not related to gameplay, is in an outrageous mess.
 
Let me list some of the problems I keep having.  Half the quests don't show on map, from the quests that do show on map, most are obscured by other map elements, that can not be disabled, like town markers . And from the tiny pool of quests that do show on map, almost none make it to the mini map.
 
The quest tracker is bonkers, can not be resized or repositioned, pointless cathegories in it that can not be removed, so if I may want to keep the challenges section open inside the quest tracker, i can NOT remove the unlocked and repeatable entries, they permanently steal real estate even if disabled, unless i remove the challenges section altogether. Challenges don't appear on map, this is compounded when in an area with 30 other people competing for the same challenge resource, can't even see where is the area of intrest. Almost no challenge objective is presented in a straightforward manner, if in the challenge area there are other dynamic elements like quests, mobs, enemy players, it becomes increasingly difficult to extract from the game what the hell one must actually do.
 
Some quests can't even be tracked, they are in the quest log and you get something like "go to the portal in Illium" of which there are like 10. that's it. Nothing more to go on. I had less problems with quests in WoW Vanilla.
 
Because of the rune system, switching gear is a negative incentive. Since salvaging an old piece of gear with runes inside does not also salvage the runes themselves. The money spent to unlock extra rune sockets is not reimbursed trough extra salvage materials. And one can't unsocket runes with money. So the player may find some piece of gear that is marginally better, but actually equipping it is prohibitively expensive, because the stat gain does not make up for the massive gold cost of applying runes.
 
The player can not use the runestation pannel to craft runes in the wild, nor can he use his profession in the wild, teleporting to ones home has a 20 minutes cooldown and the player can't reposition terminals in ones home, all being very very far away from each other didn't even see a way to create a bank in the home plot thing, the capital city is arbitrarily imense and nothing is centralized. Quest hubs always miss one, two or all of the elements relevant for leveling: bank, crafting station, runestation, pvp leveling gear vendor.
 
So as far as quality of life goes, 2/10
 
Had some issues with random drops in FPS, for no reason, plus memory leaks that lead to complete crashes in FPS every two hours, fixed with a client restart.
 
Client 5/10
 
Gameplay doe, I really like it!
 
Played lots of pvp during the bonus renown thing weekend. Managed to buy all my tier 2 entry lvl stuff and some stones for gear imbuement. The stones look exactly the same, which makes bank management even worse but w/e.
 
What I am annoyed with is the skills.
 
As a warrior, about half the skills are excelent, snappy, responsive, swift, some can be cast at the same time so no opportunity loss from dps'ing.
 
But some are incredibly buggy, for example the chain-pull-lasso-thing. It does not work half the time, even against mobs, the range is 20 meters, I stay at 15 meters, press the button, nothing happens. Try again after the cooldown and it works, try again and it doesen't. Other skills, like the charge in the support pannel are incredibly slooooooooooooooooow, and can not be targeted to a specific enemy so quite useless in melee, it fails miserably when trying to go even slightly uphill.
 
Skills, combat 9/10
 
Also line of sight. It seems like i'm playing a WoW Private server. Every one and their dog ( or dogs, or 3 spiders ) can fire trough any wall with any AOE or generic directional attack. Jump under a bridge, the guys above can still inadvertenly hit you. Pick up a flag mask thing and go behind a pillar, it matters not, the conga line behind will still hit with all their attacks.
 
Line of sight 0/10
 
Pet name plates can not be disabled, so when fighting engineers it's always three red name plates per engineer, so visual real estate is poluted, especially with the pets being so worthless, it's not like they're dangerous or anything.
 
Still quality of life so 2/10
 
Pvp as a whole has been really fun so far, it's nice to lose a battleground and still get 10 achievements ;-)
 
Greatest solo queue KDA up to now has been 35/0/17 , let's get the 50/0/X FIGHTO.
 
10/10 PVP fun	
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