Collecting your interface woes - IDEAS FOR RYZOM

Gidget

Maybe the User Manual page at Ryzom Wiki should be mandatory reading, or at least more publicized.

If the content cannot be put in game then at least a npc or info board that says how to find it could be useful if placed well.

Gidget

Llana
resources are mysterious green globs. There is no way to tell what you are gathering which is kind of lame and annoying. This may be a game mechanic decision but it is an ui issue in the end as well. It does not even make sense. You cannot really gather something without knowing what it is. If you gather bark then you must have peeled bark and not chipped off shell pieces.

With the Knowledge stanza, it's easy to scout an area and dig only the spots that have what you want. With the material specializations and different grades of "Find better materials" stanza, you can go into an area that has 5 different mats in three different grades (many spots have Basic, Fine, and Choice) and pop ONLY what you want. Sure, I may be in an area with Basic resin and Choice node, but if I want Fine wood, then the only spots that I pop are all Fine wood. Such are the perks of being a high-level digger.

That said, it's really rough at lower levels, especially if you don't have a lot of flags on your map denoting where to dig for what. I recall having the same complaint when I first started, and I can safely say that it gets MUCH better if you persist. Digging is probably the hardest and most frustrating of the four skill trees to start out, but it's also the branch that improves the most as you level up. The other three branches just have you doing the same things against higher-level enemies or making gear with a couple of stats higher than what a lower-level crafter can do, but the difference between a low-level digger and a master digger is just phenomenal.

I hoped higher level profession in armor making will allow to create more different armor designs rather than same armor with different numbers .. but maybe I had too high expectations of the crafting system.

Gidget

Llana
Seems some of the problems fall in the "no tutorial for it" category - because they work differently in Ryzom and because new people need to learn about it anyway even if it's the same as in every other game.

I've always felt Silan was a little lacking, but much of that is because there is no opportunity to review. If you don't learn something when the NPCs teach you, your only real recourse is to ask in Uni. Given how many people skip through dialogs they feel will have no relevance to their future, that means a lot of players run into trouble with magic, digging, and crafting.

That's not really a problem. I can read and I can create a new character and do the tutorials again, too.

Gidget

Lllana
I find the lack of looting key annoying. Since looting is kind of required to progress in some quests and crafting and it's annoying my overall impression of the game is not positive.

I find it an effective anti-botting measure. Sure, it's sometimes a hassle to run up to your kill and press a button on a pop-up window, but when the alternative is a world full of bots, I think the effort of looting a kill the way we do it is a small price to pay. Think about it; how worthwhile would it be to try to hunt mobs if a few hundred homins had a script that targeted the nearest mob, killed it, looted it, and repeated the cycle with no human intervention at all? That'd make for a boring game, right? But with the macro system built into Ryzom, it'd be almost trivial to make such a script if there were a way to loot easier than we do now.

This is a game so it is supposed to be about things you want to do rather than things you would rather script. So if you need anti-botting measures it is a design failure and you add an insult to an injury when the anti-botting measures get in the way of people enjoying the game.

Gidget

Besides, double-clicking on a dead mob will make you run over to the corpse and pop open the loot dialog anyways. Three clicks and you got loot! Why not use a button you already have a finger on all the time anyways instead of having to remeber yet another keybind?

Because it is totally not true.

I am not a FPS player so I almost never have my finger on the mouse button
muticlicking is totally annoying interface - you either get unwieldy mouse that gets painful to use after a few thousand clicks or you get a tablet. And a tablet must be either resonably sized with no way to effectively multiclick with muticlick distance detection tuned for mice or huge, expensive, and taking up too much room to use comfortably with a keyboard.
it is totally annoying to have to grab a mouse to target on a mob when you have your hands on the keyboard

Gidget

Llana
I can understand it may take skill to see quality of a piece of bark or to prospect for it but once it is on the ground you should be able to see it is a piece of bark without any skill whasoever.
It is against logic and against new people to have only mysterious green globs.

The mats you pop are not on the ground; they are still under the ground, hence the need to dig for it after you prospect. Picks are not for lifting stuff off the ground, but for making a hole in the ground. The green globs are more of a "Dig here for mats!" than the actual mats themselves. It seems perfectly logical to me.

There are surely more expressive ways to denote dig spots than green globs.

It does not make much sense for half of the stuff to be underground, anyway.

Especially the beginner resources you see without prospecting.

So it would make sense to show resources as whatever they are if you can see them without prospecting or you used right prospecting skill to know exactly what resource you get and some generic dig spot markers for the rest.

Finally there is another interface issue with the camera zoom control with mouse - as you move mouse a bit further from where you pressed the mouse button camera starts rotating like mad. This can be surely solved better and is in many games that use mouse for camera control.