Getting too difficult for me ...

[T-rex2298]

It was a good reply until suddenly it turned to hate at the end. I have no idea what you mean by "don't leave rubbish reviews on what makes the game what it was intended to be". Where would I go to leave a "rubbish review"? If you are talking about social media, I'm not on any of it and never will be.

If I sounded frustrated in my post, it's because I was. Losing hours of gameplay is NOT fun; believe me. But I wasn't threatening anybody with using reviews as a weapon.

Anyways, I'm getting better at saving. I still disagree. Having to remember to save the game doesn't make it more fun.

Sorry if it sounded like hate at the end. Didnt intend it to. I'll be more careful in the future.

[Dan_W_58]

I'm still playing.
Did the Vilegard missions. Then explored more to the East and found the gorgoyles cave, and got the stone cuirass.
Then I explored NorthEast of Norfolk along the coast to a lone cabin with a lake on the backyard, but their mission was impossible for me; I barely made it back alive.
Then exploted SouthWest, to that prison there., Flagstone; got their Pride sword.
Then headed to Stoutford. Did the lost girl mission
Then North, passed through the dark maze, lied to the agent, got a mission at Prim then climbed the mountain to the West. There I got two missions: deliver an ultimatum, and collect wrym claws. Problem is that no wyrms seem to ever drop a claw; and more importantly, I spent all 50 bottles of bone-meal and a supermarket's stock of apples and carrots already. And although I have 7056 gold in my pocket, nobody wants to sell me anything.
I know the developers don't like any criticism, but to me there's an issue here, and I'm gonna say it: When this business of having to gain the trust of an entire town first came up in Vilegard, it was fresh and new and creative; but now the same thing happening AGAIN at this mountain town made me swear and curse. Plus, it comes as a totally unfair game- killing blow, to face such an arbitrary, silly and manufactured problem in the middle of a monster- infested nowhere, with no hope of a solution. I hope I still have a save-slot from before this disastrous adventure.

But I can imagin the automatic argument coming my way, "we want to make the game more difficult; not less difficult."
To which I will answer that not all difficulties contribute to enjoyment or immersion. Difficulty has become culturally endemic value overrating. Same as movie critics being over-critica just to play safe, and just like coffee snobs complaining their coffee is not hot enough, gamers have every incentive to complain the game is too easy. They are just bragging about their skills.
Difficulty per se has no value.
Injecting bugs that crash the game at random times, for instance, would make the game more difficult to play but such a feature would have negative appeal. At the other extreme, you have features in games sometimes that multiply immersiveness without adding difficulty, such as music... Privateer, Myst and Diablo are good examples. So difficulty should not be used as a sacred cow, blanket justification.

Maybe I forgot to mention this is a good game, except for a few frustrating details. I'm not a career politician, that should be clear.

My current stats:
Level 23.
Skills: Increased Fortitude (2), Quick Learner (3)
Attack cost: 5
Attack chance: 137
Attack damage: 12-20
Critical hit skill: 17
Critical multiplier: 2.0
Eff.Crit.Chance: 13%
Block chance: 96
Damage resistance: 2

Equipment:
Leather Cap ... BC 6
Stone Cuirass ... Attack cost +2 AP, BC 22, DMG +1
Jewel of Fallhaven ... lowers attack cost by 1
Flagstone's Pride longsword ... 4 AP, AC 21, AD 1-6, Crit 10, mult 2.0
Strong Wooden Tower Shield ... AC -6, BC +14
Polished Ring of Backstabbing ... AC 22, AD 4, Crit +7
Villain's Ring ... AC 25, AD 3-6, HP 4
Cainmail mittens ... AC -3, BC +7, DMG +1
Vacor's Boots of Attack ... AC 9, BC 2

[CUCHULAINN3]

You will get better and stronger in time it's all how you play the game and also how you place your stats. Gear really isn't that big of a deal. Many people have done the blackwater gear or the gear you get in Stoutford.

If you make it to Remgard I would side with the witch and get the necklace

[rijackson741]

Problem is that no wyrms seem to ever drop a claw; and more importantly, I spent all 50 bottles of bone-meal and a supermarket's stock of apples and carrots already. And although I have 7056 gold in my pocket, nobody wants to sell me anything.

White wyrms drop them 10% of the time.
Nobody will sell you anything until you have picked a side and resolved the dispute.

I know the developers don't like any criticism, but to me there's an issue here, and I'm gonna say it: When this business of having to gain the trust of an entire town first came up in Vilegard, it was fresh and new and creative; but now the same thing happening AGAIN at this mountain town made me swear and curse. Plus, it comes as a totally unfair game- killing blow, to face such an arbitrary, silly and manufactured problem in the middle of a monster- infested nowhere, with no hope of a solution. I hope I still have a save-slot from before this disastrous adventure.

That depends on the nature of the criticism. We are giving something away for free, so complaints along the lines of "you are not generating new content fast enough" don't sit too well. Constructive ideas are always welcome, even though we may disagree. As I do in this case. In Vilegard you simply have a village that does not trust outsiders. At BWM you have to resolve a dispute between two settlements. So not the same thing at all. The solution certainly exists. Resolve the dispute.

But I can imagin the automatic argument coming my way, "we want to make the game more difficult; not less difficult."

Why do you imagine that? For the most part, we do not want to make the game easier, but we have no inclination to make it harder either. I say "for the most part", because we are actively working on making the level 5-20 stage less of a grind.

My current stats:
Level 23.
Skills: Increased Fortitude (2), Quick Learner (3)
Attack cost: 5
Attack chance: 137
Attack damage: 12-20
Critical hit skill: 17
Critical multiplier: 2.0
Eff.Crit.Chance: 13%
Block chance: 96
Damage resistance: 2

Equipment:
Leather Cap ... BC 6
Stone Cuirass ... Attack cost +2 AP, BC 22, DMG +1
Jewel of Fallhaven ... lowers attack cost by 1
Flagstone's Pride longsword ... 4 AP, AC 21, AD 1-6, Crit 10, mult 2.0
Strong Wooden Tower Shield ... AC -6, BC +14
Polished Ring of Backstabbing ... AC 22, AD 4, Crit +7
Villain's Ring ... AC 25, AD 3-6, HP 4
Cainmail mittens ... AC -3, BC +7, DMG +1
Vacor's Boots of Attack ... AC 9, BC 2

Your stats are pretty good, although I would look seriously at the combat speed skill.

[Dan_W_58]

Thanks for the detailed answer, things make more sense now. And yes, I was seriously considering upping my AP's for the next two level up's; I was in fact wondering if it might be possible to get 3 strikes per turn. But my other more pressing concern is damage: My present strikes seem powerless; it seems I only deal damage to wyrms at random times, when a critical hit happens. So I think I will do at least one Hard Hit first, then two Speed's.

Regarding people demanding faster content delivery, I know exactly what you mean; I was lead developer of an open source game, about ten years ago. A 3D game fighting and trading in space.
In fact, it crossed my mind to join you, but right now I have no computer, no job, no money, waiting for a first unemployment cheque to arrive almost 8 weeks after my layoff. If my situation improves, I'll let you know; I have many ideas, e.g. for graphical improvements.

[CKork]

Looking at your stats and equipment, it seems you only have put 3 points in increased damage, rest comes frol equipment.
Attack chance is OKish for that area. The other stats look fine.
It might be worthwhile to go for +AP skill and skip hard hit, and instead invest the skill points along the way in the +dmg stat.

Also food for thought:
Skills like quick learner speed up XP gain, but in the end only save time and do not improve your character. Personally I`m more of a fan of skills that actually benefit your direct playstyle.

Also agree that BWM, Prim and Vilegard are different things. And after all, somehow you need to convince people of doing stuff for you. I the real world, would a weapons dealer sell stuff to anyone? Nope, you need a background check or weapons permit, depending on where you live, or convince weapon smugglers to trust you enough to not go to cops and sell you stuff. Think of it

[Dan_W_58]

@CKork I got the message that BWM is like that for a different reason that Vilegard, but my feedback is good anyways: from the point of view of one player, me, that felt like recycling of the Vilegard paradigm. In fact it IS recycling, with a justification inserted, but it IS just reusing an idea that IMO should not be reused. Anyways, if I reacted so negatively to this recycling, you can bet several body parts that many other players will react same way.
But more importantly, players come in a very wide range of skills and abilities and preferences. Blackwater mountain is remote, it is crawling with monsters all the way up there; I consumed my whole stash of bone-meal just to get up there, and then I'm given a death sentence, basically. You say in the real world I can't just go buy weapons anywhere. That is not a fair comparison. In the real world I don't need weapons to survive. I don't face wyrm as soon as I step out. Besides, what I needed to buy was not weapons. I only needed health potions.
I don't think it is fair.
Games should be difficult but fair.
This stupid refusal to trade caused me to have to abandon the adventure, and I resent it. I do.

Well, it's 1:45 am here. I got home at 6pm and have been playing non-stop. So, slmost 8 hours.
I gave up on blackwater mountain; that was hopeless, being out of healing potions and food and being denied trade for no good reason.
So I loaded a save from Stratford, after completing the lost items mission, which still mot cleared; it showed as in-progress; not sure what else the game wants from me. There should at least be a clue...
I sold the stone cuirass, and bought the Robe of the Sublimate. After that I had the three strikes per turn I was theorizing. I leveled up strength. Right away I was killing everything in sight with just two strikes. Huge gifference those two things made.
Headed back to crossglen and fallhaven to grind and load up on bone-meal. Decided to try to advance the quests. Did the church catacombs and thieves' guild missions, then went to Vilegard to look for the mumbling guy with the password. Got it. Then headed northwest on the highway to look for the hiiding brewster around the funny rocks. Across from it, on the other side of the road, there's a hatch going down to a cave full of terrestrial jelly-fish. Forgot to look at my health points. Woke up at a hotel. Chechlked the swords icon and it said my penalty was over 2600 experience. That was unacceptable to me, so I reloaded, and then relized I had never saved in the whole 8 hours.
But you guys won't agree with me about auto-save.
But I can't take any more punishment.
I'm done.
I'm uninstalling ....
DONE.
Better to have wasted a week than to look forward at wasting many weeks. I congratulate you on a really good game; but without autosave I just can't go on.

[CKork]

Make a new save slot with the new progress, then reload. If you see that 8 hours of Progress are lost, load the new save again. I am sure 2600 xp (takes me 5 minutes of easy mob grind at max at lvl 25) is less of a penalty than losing 8 hours. Its just weighing out and deciding on your options.

Sad to see you came to the conclusions you did.

[rijackson741]

But you guys won't agree with me about auto-save.

Nobody else has ever requested it, so it is not reasonable for us to spend time implementing it.
Nobody else has ever not saved for 8 hours, died, and then blamed anyone but themselves for not saving.

I would also have just given up the XP over giving up 8 hours of work. There are many quests that give you more XP than that in one go.

[Dan_W_58]

Nobody else has ever not saved for 8 hours, died, and then blamed anyone but themselves for not saving.

There's a difference betwee not blaming oneself and coming back from blaming oneself. The first dozen times I lost hours because of forgetting to save , I blamed myself. But eventually realized that blaming myself was not helping the situation, so I thought about it and came to the conclusion that lack of an auto-save is a strategic error. I also am a programmer (C, C++, Eiffel, and various Assemly) so I know that implementing auto-save is no big deal. And to NOT have auto-save is tantamount to asking people who are not good at multi-tasking to change their nature. It's not realistic or fair.

Also, you say that taking 2700 exp penalty is preferable, and that some missions give you more than that.
First, the most I got from a mission was 1200 so far, and it takes time to complete, hours sometimes. Maybe you're talking about later missions.
Second, you don't understand that this is not a once off forgetting to save and getting penalized. Originally I WAS taking the experience penalty, but taking the penalty again and again results in the experience bar never moving up.

But the bigger problem here is that you guys are not reacting positively to my constructinve criticism. All you are trying to do is to argue to try to convince me to drop the request, or downright get rid of me (successfully, I might add, but you should ask yourselves who won what out of my having to go away; it is a great loss to you, as I could have helped you in many ways, even graphics and programming). You could have coded my request in less time than you took to write an answer to my post. I once reported a bug to Mozilla and just days later it was fixed. As an open source game developer myself I used to "listen to my customers" when they had needs or wishes that were well articulated and not unreasonable. I never said to them that they should be second, never first, to suggest something. I never said "I'm doing this for free so don't dare criticize". And I never suggested to them that blaming themselves was a solution.

I say it for the last time, this game is great and very immersive, but by the same token it needs Auto-Save, because to remember to save one has to remember that one is playing a game; but the term "immersive" means precisely that one forgets that one is playing a game.

Do you see a problem?

Secondly, and this entails far more work, you could have a settings or preferences screen where people can opt out of auto-save. But default should be ON.

EDIT: Penalty for death should be an option too. I'm sure some players applaud it; i hate it.