Why Albion Online is the Best MMO Game
First of all I'd like to give a little background on myself.
I am a quite dedicated MMORPG player. My interest in MMORPG is not only as a player, but also as a game developer.
I have player UO, Lineage 2, Wow, Aion, Guild Wars 2 and these are just the widely popular ones.I've studied and modified several open source servers for UO and Wow, and I've helped create major parts of L2J.
That being said I believe my knowledge about game design and player psychology is a bit better than that of an average player.
Albion has many issues, but one strikes me more than any other.
As a working person I don't really have much time to spend on games, because I need to work, and I also have a family. For this reason I am willing to play games that allow me to waste less time on 'preparation' and have more time for actually having fun. I am even willing to pay real money to avoid the usual grind. The latest changes introduces one feature, which is extremely interesting and another, that completely negates the concept of 'wasting less time on grinding'.
Each biome has different resource types, which helps move people around, stimulates trade and player economy.
At the same time you can not carry anything when using caravans.
As a result, for me to upgrade my personal house I will have to:
- go to a biome where there are trees
- gather enough of the tiers 2 ~ X (where X is the current tier upgrade)
- move those back to my island
- go to a biome where there are stones
- gather enough of the tiers 2 ~ X (where X is the current tier upgrade)
- move those back to my island
I need to repeat this voyage each time I want something upgraded, where each journey is 2-stepped:
1. go from the village to the starting zone
2. from the starting zone port by ship to the starting zone of the target biome
3. go to the sub-zone where the resources are
4. go the exact same journey in the opposite direction
Without absolutely any exaggeration I can confirm that upgrading my house from tier 2 to tier 3 took exactly 2.5 hours of JUST RUNNING (and I knew how much materials I need and I didn't make any unnecessary moves).
My prediction is that upgrading my island and all the buildings in it to tier 4 will take me over 20+ hours of JUST RUNNING.
So you are basically providing me a game, where I will be running manually for weeks(literally) before I can upgrade my own house and eventually reach a point when I can start enjoying the game by either crafting good items or playing high-end dungeons. And on top of that, even when I become top player in my desired specialty I will continue to be running for weeks just to be able to enjoy a couple of hours of play.
That is, by all standards, a bad design. Wasting time, without the option to compensate for it, is plainly telling your players "We do NOT care about your time, we do NOT care about your money, we do NOT care about what is important to you or to your families. You will have to waste multiple hours doing brainless clicking on the map, travelling the exact same road you traveled an hour ago; and you're gona do it again, and again, just to move a small pile of resources from point A to point B, and you will do that, because we don't care."
I like Albion, I really love the ideas about the combat system, the crafting system, the world as a whole, but my advice, as a player that has been looking for a game like this for over 8 years now:
Stop wasting our time, or we will just uninstall and forget about Albion. And we will continue waiting. Because we have better things to do with our time than to run the same road each day for hours. Running in MMORPG has never been fun and will never be.