Here we are, over 10 years into W101, and we still have pain points where it comes to the speed of the game. There are issues that need to be addressed, and that's exactly what this thread is going to talk about. I love the game, but there are definitely slow points.
Before addressing the pain points, I want to point out the pain relief points, because these will help:
50% mounts AoE hitting all at the same time Having an ally be able to get in on a fight immediately if during the spell choosing aspect of the fight
These are all hugely successful and should not be overlooked. Thank you KI for these options.
Now, let's dive into pain points:
1) Defeat and Collect quests - yes, these are STILL an issue. If the item needing to be collected drops, drop the same quantity for everybody in the fight. I can't begin to tell you how many times my questing partner will get 3 out of 6 of something and I won't get a single one after the exact same fight. Giving out the same rewards to all participants in the fight will speed it along and make questing faster. This one right here is historically the BIGGEST slow points of the game, hands down. It could be argued that requiring 5 drops from an enemy instead of 4 is another one as well. There’s no way to quickly get said drops if you need yet another fight that might not drop the item.
2) Hatching - this is talked about a lot. What I would love to see here is for us to be able to choose what pet we get, NOT the talents. I was trying to help a friend hatch for a kookaburra pet, and it took like 20 times just to get the pet. That wastes time and is incredibly frustrating. Her new life was very young and she doesnt have many wizards on the account, so she wasnt flush with gold.
3) Cut scenes - I hate that many of them in later worlds have dialog that can't be skipped by hitting MORE, because there's no button for it. Simply allow us the option to move ALL dialog along. Also, you could create a farming mode where the cut scenes can be totally skipped after the first time through it on the account. Perhaps a new server or two should be made where all cut scenes are just skipped
4) Dialog - as above OR put all the dialog one character says on one long scroll screen. If one person is talking to you, we shouldnt need to hit the MORE button more than once, and certainly not 15 times (in later worlds).
5) Polaris lag - ever since Polaris came out, there are MANY fights where after the enemy dies, it takes about 20-30 seconds to actually FINISH the fight. It seems like the game is trying to figure out if they're still alive or something. Please just get rid of this dead space. While it’s been a while since I’ve been in Polaris, I believe it was mostly the street fights and not boss fights.
6) AoE Spells - this is a well-traveled road; however, there’s more work to be done beyond the hitting all of them at the same time. If the spells are putting up secondary effects (shields, absorbs, multiple effects per target), just have them enacted all at the same time.
7) Gardening A) Allow us to shut off animations. Many times when I garden, because I stack (which is legal by KI's own admission – altho I am slowly converting to the new flat style with the advanced move options), I get the “dancing crops syndrome" where they shift back and forth as the spell's effect gets taken off. What I want to do is shut off the plant animations. If they're not moving, they can't dance B) Please give us the "all indoor or outdoor" versions of each of the need spells C) Please give us a “Harvest all, Replant all” spell
8) Spell effects - If the fight is over, unless the spell affects an ally's health directly, don't cast the extra effects. Perfect example, if somebody does a "victory heal" (heal the same round the monsters die), by all means, do the healing, but do NOT cast the absorbs effect on Rebirth; it's just a waste of time. There's nothing left to absorb, so why put them out there?
9) Along with the above farming mode suggestion effect, also make it so if I want to keep farming an area, like the Keep of Ganelon, I would fight, kill them, and move on to the next set of monsters. It should only advance the quest if you NEED it.
10) Fishing - PLEASE give us a spell to convert all fish in a pond to a specific school. We have the "scare away all but X school fish", which is great, but what if you want to farm for that elusive fish? What I want to do is, for example, take every fish and make it a fire school fish. This way, if I need a Rank 2 fish, all rank 2 fish are now fire and maximizes my attempts. We waste a LOT of time scaring fish away, fishing for the school/rank, and refilling the pond. This would allow us to convert all school, fish a ton more, then refill the pond. The big difference is the quantity of fish we could fish at a shot. It won't eliminate a step, it will maximize our efforts and give us a better chance to find the fish we're looking for.
11) Spell learning - when we learn new spells, we get the maximum number of copies we can hold automatically in our book. I would change it so that ZERO copies go into the book, or at let us choose how many of each spell we want in our book from the very beginning (or give us a default option to choose it every time).
12) Quest advancement requiring LONG trips to the quest giver A) this is by far, the most TIRED aspect of the game. Every time we finish a quest, we have to walk/run back to the original quest giver. Why? I think it's time to give us a Communication Stone which will automatically talk to the person/people who gave you the quest (one at a time of course) and help you advance it. This way, we dont need to travel back and forth, wasting thousands of steps in some cases, just to go back to where we came from. We dont know where the next step will be, but in many cases, it's a "come back to me so I can tell you to go back to where you were, but now go further" type of thing. Instead of needing to take 300 steps, we would now be able to take 30 or 40. B) Allow us to equip crown shop Boots of the Slipstream (+8% speed) or the boots of the Comet (+4% speed) to ALL mounts. The 5%-8% speed boost would help immensely. The fastest mounts would still be pack mounts, but the regular mounts would get a nice upgrade.
13) When questing with a partner, and you both go into sigils where you need to fight monsters, then manipulate an item, the second person usually has to wait until the item comes back. SOME times that can take a while to come back. I get that we both need to use it, but how about not having it disappear so the other person(s) can use it just as quickly? The same thing happens with the Zeke type quests for things like finding the yardbirds etc.
14) Spinner/combat pointer – This is a MINOR thing of course, but when in combat, the pointer should always take the shortest path to get to the next target. Many times, when in combat, there’s cheats or may casts. If this happens a lot, the spinner navigates a lot of “miles”. What if the spinner was smarter and able to go clockwise or counter clockwise, whichever was faster? If your ally in the 4th spot’s pet casts a spell, and then it’s my turn in the first spot next, it should go counter clockwise 3 spots instead of clockwise 6 spots (including the spaces where nobody is in combat).
15) Item interaction – when we interact with things like treasure chests, it changes our direction. This is pointless. Allow us to collect the item, facing the same direction, and move on.
16) Damage or Healing over time effects. This one is a great example of how a little bit of updated coding can save us tons of time. The interaction of Snow Angel’s over time hit is by far the fastest in the game. Make ALL over time effects work at the same speed as Snow Angel.
We’ve been told that there are new ways you guys are coding, which took a long time to set up, which is fine, but now it’s time to use it better. You have now coded “containers” to help reduce things across the board. Many of these can be fixed by updating those containers. So, if you have a container for the animation and the hitting, and another container for the after effects, and another container for the hit/heal over time, then optimize ALL of those containers. A faster container on step one (even by half a second), added to a faster container on step two, added to a faster container on step three, spread across the whole game, would speed up the game by a lot, without any additional changes.
