Changeproposals

Proposals, Issues, Observations

Below are several categorised sections to outline areas of the game which we, the playerbase, believe require or deserve attention from the development team in order that the quality of the game may be improved.

This page is *not* for griping about game mechanics or decisions.

Note - This page will be *brutally* edited and trimmed in order to keep it effective. I mean *really* brutally.

Definite & General Bugs / Errors

• Bijou cannot be transfered - theoretically all thought buildings should be transferable.
• You can vote interesting *and* eyesore on sculptures.
• No 'clipboard' option on upgrading aqueduct pump cisterns
• Sevenblade: If you get challenged and lose the text says 'he challenged you', regardless of gender.
• Sevenblade: Sometimes on winning it says 'I have too many challenges in progress', and the win is recorded as a loss - even though i won the opponent's blade. Perhaps a bug on the 'disqualification due to too many losses' code.
• Music still plays with the option disabled.
• Attempting to make specialised fertilisers in the kitchen allows you to make '0' fertiliser, and confirms that you've made 0 in the Main tab. Should be a message saying 'you can't do this'?

• Major Issue: If you forget your password there is no way to try and find it through the game mechanics. I daresay we've a lot of new players who don't return because their is no obvious and easy way to reclaim a lost or forgotten password. A fraction of these certainly create new trial accounts, and are often pulled up by GMs - creating uncessesary work and tension for them, and often leading to conflict.

• The Smelting Pot is the most efficient furnace. That's *mad*. This could be easily solved by increasing the amount of ore which can be loaded into the higher-tech furnaces. Please review?

Sound Specific

The following sounds aren't affected by turning off the associated settings in utilties:

• List forthcoming
• Login Screen - as this is probably not accessible from utilities, please provide an option button on eclient or simply a means of deleting or crippling the associated music file.

Inconsistancies (UI, Principles, etc)

• Sorting of Objects in inventory - While it makes some sort of sense that herbs and mushrooms appear in the inventory list in about the space of N and M respectively, they are then sorted in alphabetical order. This does not hold true for other objects, especially complex items. For example Pearls and Grapes do not sort in an apparently logical fashion.
  • Vine cuttings in a chest have a similarly puzzling ordering.
• Rabbits and other animals cannot be seperated, but sheep can?
• Hotkeys are difficult to use when messages which should be sent to console are sent instead to a poppup which needs to be clicked on in order to continue. This really defeats the purpose of having hotkeys as you have to click on the screen anyway.
• When using hotkeys, a mis-press (for example, pressing to make a jug on a pottery wheel which is still active) will cause a popup in the middle of the screen, requiring breaking from hotkeying to remove the invasive message. Could we divert these messages to Main as part of the 'send to console' option?
  • Specific instances:
    • Message recieved when a pottery wheel is busy
• When prospecting for marble, it says, "One slate shattered!" which means you found nothing, and as such isn't very exciting. Replace the exclamation point with a period?

Specifically Relating to Wine

• Your 'wine palette' is not viewable through any menu. It's not intended to be hidden, as it informs you when it increases in a linear fashion. Currently players are having to resort to noting their level manually.
• On any vineyard, permissions for tending, cutting, harvesting are displayed in various seemingly random locations which unintuitively break up the display of the vine's current stats.
• The scrollbars in wine notebooks behave strangely.

Welcome Island & New Player Experience Specific

UI Bugs

• The popup recieved on arrival upon the mainland is seriously outdated.
• New players are 'spammed' with messages about how to use the ignore feature when they click to ride a ferry.
  • 2 confirmed cases - even if it's an intended feature, it should probably only occur on the first 'ride this ferry' click?

Bugs

• You can sail to the mainland without tearing down your woodplane, leaving you as a peasant (same for gathering some resource like straw, tar ...).

Observations/Suggestions

• Players start the game with 'Advanced Terrain' enabled. This leads to poor FPS on many machines which is interpreted as lag, causing players to quit. Also Otter said all the textures were never loaded for Advanced Terrain and that she has like for example 10 colors of grass in standard but those 10 map to only 3 in advanced. Otter says that she does the landscaping with advanced terrain off and that people should turn it off. In addition there are times things are "written" on the ground like for the first VoK altar. This writting is unseeable in advanced terrain because what was 2 different colors in standard is only 1 in advanced.

• The 'newbie cam' is extremely hard to use to navigate down the hill, and because of the panning speed it's often difficult to work out / notice how to move the camera. Stand at the top of the hill in advanced terrain with newbie cam on, and try and get down that hill :) The new players should have a message teaching them to use the different cameras especially in terms of searching for the tar pit. They should be told to use the F7 camera and zoom all the way out for finding the tar pit.

• The main road on the island currently leads down the hill, past SArch, and diverts when approaching SArt to head into the 'display area'. Many of our more vulnerable and easily confused new players follow the road blindly when reaching the bottom of the hill, and as such miss both schools, and end up confused as hell next to a pseudo-compound. I propose a simple switch of road textures, so that the main road continues to SArt, and the pebbledashed path that currently diverts to the school instead leads to the display area. This, coupled with a 'fix' for the newbiecam issue should greatly improve the island conversion rate.
• What are the chances of making the 'Welcome To Egypt' task list an uncloseable widget in a window with a scrollbar, rather than the current tab setup? I appreciate that it's not representative of later content, but lots of people don't find the tab, lose it, aren't aware you can resize it, etc.
• Some kind of indication on building the ferry (popup on selection?) that it needs to be on the coast pointing out? Lots of cases of people just sailing over ponds.
• Is there gumphtext upon learning Flax Processing explaining that to rot flax you need to use the skill, not just drop it?
• Perhaps include 'read one of the information signposts' as an early task in the list?
• 'Belongs to Unknown' is very unfriendly from a new player's perspective, and there's no indication that this simply means 'not close enough'. Might we consider rewording to 'You cannot tell from this distance', or something similar?
• Could we get the immigrants channel logged to atitd.net / somewhere? It'd be useful in terms of keeping an eye on what's going on, and problem solving with people who forget account names, etc.

• There's often confusion on the island when a new player clicks on a building not owned by them, as they can't understand why they can't use it. Would it be possible for them to gain some info text on clicking buildings that don't belong to them in the actual popup on the building?

• Lots of new players eat herbs raw from the ground, and then find that they cannot move and aren't aware of why. The str/dex carry limits, etc, aren't at all clear at that point. Perhaps for the first eating, an 'be aware that this may negatively affect your abilities for a short time' message?
• Could we make enabling of hotkeys somewhat easier? It's very complicated, and not at all accessable atm.

• The message about needing to research in order to build better brick racks seems to be confusing. Could we take a look at the wording, and make it clearer that you need to get to the mainland?

General Observations / Suggestions

• Could we have control over what's displayed on the Calendar? At the moment all I have is lists and lists of tower times - I'd like to be able to filter.
• The F3 map sometimes require a microscope. Would it be possible to add zoom capabilities? Vector graphics?
• Rythmic Strength is very imbalanced. With Greenhouses being a fairly accessable tech, the costs and effort involved in going from getting the skill to having a useable scythe and a basket made the skill almost entirely redundant.
• Could we get a pre-metal hatchet? A heavy flint axe, or somesuch, that could break fairly often, that just gave a high chance of 2* harvest?
• Is it possible for a mine to display the kind of gem it contains? Maybe once one has been mined? It seems strange that there is a visible cue as to the type of ore the mine contains, but nothing about the gem type.
• Is it possible to add functionality to turn landmarks on/off on the F3 map? They would be much more useable if adding too many didn't clutter up the map.
  • Could we at least have the option of displaying or not displaying the coordinates in the text that is shown on the map? The coordinates tacked on the end really clutter things up fast, and you can always look up your landmark list to find them.
  • If we could have a few categories to put landmarks in like 'Mines' 'My Stuff' 'Resources' 'Misc' (anyone got other ideas?) and then be able to say which category(ies) we want to see displayed, if any, that would really rock.
    • If we can't categorize coordinates could we add a Landmark log where it will record coordinates but not list them on the map? This would be useful for recording the locations of our chests, compounds, etc. that people tend to forget once they have so many. (I put a fancier version in the category below. Sorry if that's a no no, I'm new to this editing gig -Shivani)
• Is it possible to add functionality to type in a set of coords and put a point on your F3 map? It would really make finding people, places and things much easier.

Crazy ingenious and simple ideas to improve the game

• Info buttons on schools/unis with gumph about skills.
  • Discussed - Outcome pending.
• Multilevel skills in schools should be displayed as X/Y - how am I meant to know that there are multiple levels of Navigation? :)
• When you select the "Listen" menu on the Watermine, it would be nice to get an audio cue, rather than a text message. It would be wonderful if the pitch of the gurgle varied in accordance with the pitch of the watermine, so that you'd be able to run to the correct watermine when the actual gem only shows as one or two pixels.
• Raeli Ovens can dredge clay into tiles. Why not make a very similar building that just dredges clay w/o baking it, with a very minimal chance of dredging flint as well (as it is more likely to break). Or simply accumulate debens of clay, rather than white tiles, until the oven is actually fired.
• Have a button pop up when you build/click on buildings that you/your guild owns with the option "Add this to my list of Properties". If you click on that, it adds it to a list showing the name of the buiding (if there is one) and the coordinates of the place. This would come up for everything that can be built outside of a compound, including compounds. (See also landmark log comments in the above section.)
• It would be really nice to be able to attach "notes" to a building. For instance, note the color order of a raeli oven, and if you had papyrus paper, a quill, and ink in your inventory, you could "make notes" that anyone could then view. Other useful "notes" buildings: glazier's benches with degrees and times, etc
• It would be nice if spouse log-on is differentiated, so that people know it's spouses chatting etc. For example, If "MalePlayer" logs in as his wife, all chat would say "MalePlayer(FemalePlayer):" and the info showing the last time the "MalePlayer" logs on, not the "FemalePlayer".

It occurs to me that the difference between principles and tests is a bit blurred in terms of presentation to new players. I suggest that the principles tabs be altered in such a way so as that they 'primary principle goal' (ie, in Obelisk, 'Build a size 7 Obelisk') be highlighted with a different coloured text, and I also propose that the ultimate 'test goal' (ie, Build the Biggest Obelisk in your region for an hour, etc etc) be added to the list in a different colour spaced beneath the principles list.

UI Typos

• Some buildings like the MCB and banners have no spaces or capitalization. (orangebanner, purplebanner, whitebanner, masterscastingbox)
• On a forge is says "Make a set of copper straps" when you only make 1.
• Wine related: "palette" should be "palate". "burnt matchs" should be "burnt matches."
• When attempting to learn a multilevel skill from a university, when your level is higher than the one being taught, the message is "You already know more about <skillname> as this school does>

Repeat Note - This page will be *brutally* edited and trimmed in order to keep it effective. I mean *really* brutally.