I have been playing for three days and I want to say that I enjoy Ryzom very much especially being a fan of skill-based character progression, sandbox play, and deep crafting.
The one aspect of the game I do not enjoy is combat and this for a minor yet aggravating reason: rapid corpse decay + no auto-loot. Corpses decay so quickly one has to loot between every mob or risk losing spoils. This throws combat pacing off so instead of it being visceral and fun it is a halting repetition of:
Swing, swing, kill mob, wait, wait, wait, wait, doubleclick corpse, select loot all, target
next mob.
The waiting is because there is 2-3 second delay before a corpse switches from attackable to lootable. There are more loot mechanics involved in combat than actual combat. A super simple solution is to slow the corpse decay timer so that someone can have fun fighting for a while and then do a quick round of looting. An even better solution would be like Tabula Rasa, where one merely ran over corpses to loot them.
The one aspect of the game I do not enjoy is combat and this for a minor yet aggravating reason: rapid corpse decay + no auto-loot. Corpses decay so quickly one has to loot between every mob or risk losing spoils. This throws combat pacing off so instead of it being visceral and fun it is a halting repetition of:
Swing, swing, kill mob, wait, wait, wait, wait, doubleclick corpse, select loot all, target
next mob.
The waiting is because there is 2-3 second delay before a corpse switches from attackable to lootable. There are more loot mechanics involved in combat than actual combat. A super simple solution is to slow the corpse decay timer so that someone can have fun fighting for a while and then do a quick round of looting. An even better solution would be like Tabula Rasa, where one merely ran over corpses to loot them.