Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Groove said:

Comprehensive breakdown of the 5-day playtest

July 23rd Playtest Results — Monsters & Memories

Hello! As promised, here is a breakdown of the July 23th Playtest Results. When you look at the charts, please remember that the test ran for 5 days and both the 23rd and the 28th are not full days.

monstersandmemories.com

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heh, I talked to one of the top 10 poopsocker on the server a bit about mining and alchemy. Not only did he get to level 33 on a bard, I think he also had almost maxed BS and JC, along with good enough alchemy to make me a few tempers for steel weapons. Herbs for alchemy was sooo much harder to farm after getting used to ore.

Quaid said:

A couple stats stand out to me:

1. Around 47% of players logged fewer than 5 hours. It’s unlikely they got past level 4 or so.

2. S Sloan played 89 hours over a 5 day period.

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1. Exclamation point followers griefed off by an ashira warrior

2. Total played over the life of the server sir, not just the most recent 5 day test (there were two other weekend tests on this server). Notice Talet has 143 hours.

Kithani said:

Archer really should just be combined with Ranger tbh

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I think the wiki was showing them and rogues being rather incomplete. Wonder if that affected many people tying them. The main website says that they are not solo friendly at all, so that would also hurt their numbers for something like this, whereas in a full game, more people might play them once guilds get truly formed.

mkopec said:

My 2c? I think the vanilla WoW is the perfect mix of things if you want that "classic" vibe. You can play for hours and none of that shit is downtime, staring at your spell book, or whatever the fuck, its just fun. Still took tons of hours to level and even more to gear yourself out, but none of it really was tedious or riddled with downtime. It was smooth and responsive as well. Yeah I was an EQ diehard back in them days, I thought wow sucked. But now? Shit, totally opposite. Ive leveled several characters across multiple servers when vanilla came out and the years after. I want to be entertained when playing games, not frustrated. I tried P99 or whatever that server is called and lasted all about 2 hours, until I died, could not find my corpse and said fuck this shit im out. Same with Pantheon afew hours and I was done. Like I said, im older now and value my time. So should the game.

Last MMO I really got into was New World through the whole COVID thing. Met some cool peeps and just did stuff together. Played the shit out of that game. None of that game was tedium or old systems relying on downtime or whatever. Yeah it had no end game and that was its downfall but I sunk like 800 hrs into that game.

Its not to say this game wont have a market or whatever, im sure it will, but a mass market it wont be if they stick to the whole 1999 tedium thing.

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WoW is garbage until end game, which was some of the best raiding ever.

I say IS because when it came out it certainly wasn't garbage; it was new / novel and the whole being a solo hero, getting new quest at every new area every 4-5 lvls and replacing gear every 4-5 levels was captivating to a crowd that was used to fighting over cracked staffs and wearing the same gear for 50 lvls. People felt like they were winning with all that gear thrown at them and continual power increases every 4-5 levels after being used to the difficulty of Ultima, EQ, etc. Shit you could get to endgame all by yourself and get geared just by killing 10 wolves that had different fur color in every new area - much better than having a griffon wipe your lvl 10 group and spending an hour finding the bodies or getting trained out of Efreeti after camping it for 5 hours! Wowifcation was so popular single player games started emulating it. However....



It was really just the time and place and novelty of it. Made people feel special as individuals like older generation of MUDs and MMORPGs did not. It lasted less than 10 years until gaming culture generally started pushing back that it wasnt actually that great of system and was just dumbing down gaming in general. Ubisoft for example went from being on top of the world to generally being considered a shit studio now because they cant make any other types of games. Pendulum has swung back. There is a reason why elden ring, baldurs gate, shit even BoTW comparatively, became smash hits and are 180s of the WoW model.

I have a bunch of friends that play WoW and every WoW classic server that comes out. I love classic wow raiding - I had a guild on Season of mastery that made it to Cthun before calling it for the next one - there were 2 horde guilds that were ahead of us (Polar was one, the other was the server GDKP guild forget the name). SoM was even more fun with shit like the drakes before chromag in BWL being mini 4 horseman...not being able to dodge chromag breaths behind the wall, etc... but there is a big difference between classic WoW RAIDING and the game before that. The game before that sucks. When a new classic server hits its speedrun to 60 and then speedruning raids or spending 20 hours a day becoming the first few grandmasters before the curve gets fucked. Spending 10 hours a day farming fucking flasks and pots and engineering mats etc. Very few(edit) play it because they like lvling or the structure of the game outside of BGs and raids - which ironically are the sweaty, time wasting, competitive parts of it. Shit the most popular iteration of classic WoW recently has been the hardcore version - where people dont do dungeons and pull back to safe spots like EQ!

Also quitting p99 because you lost your lvl 2 corpse is embarrassing.

I absolutely loved this play test. Playing with HDR didn't have an issue at night on in WBT. Got a ranger up to 14 and enchanter up to 8. Enchanter def brought back to excitement of playing EQ1 back in TZ days and TP.

I didn't think of trying HDR! I wonder if it even works in xwindows.

I tried to get the xlibre fork going yesterday but it is a pain in the ass right now.

Sloan said:

1. Exclamation point followers griefed off by an ashira warrior

2. Total played over the life of the server sir, not just the most recent 5 day test (there were two other weekend tests on this server). Notice Talet has 143 hours.

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oh thank God i was worried your ass would become one with the chair

Sloan said:

2. Total played over the life of the server sir, not just the most recent 5 day test (there were two other weekend tests on this server). Notice Talet has 143 hours.

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So...89 hours in 9 days then? Thanks for clarifying, that makes it sound much healthier...

Sorry to add to the less than 5 stat.. haha no real time. Mostly just ran around.

Half the time I am on my laptop and no mouse and trackpad play is gay. I did make a dude in tree town and wondered around just to look at it.

Siliconemelons said:

Sorry to add to the less than 5 stat.. haha no real time. Mostly just ran around.

Half the time I am on my laptop and no mouse and trackpad play is gay. I did make a dude in tree town and wondered around just to look at it.

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I have no frame of reference or expertise, but a 50% churn before level 5 seems insane to me.

If 50% of guests who ate at my restaurant the first time never returned I'd be beside myself.

I'm sure that'll be different once people actually have money spent on a sub, and when they can actually choose their preferred starting zone flavour. I'm one of those people for sure. The desert and tree city biomes in EQ were my least favourite, and that's all that's available in MnM.

Kirun said:

So...89 hours in 9 days then? Thanks for clarifying, that makes it sound much healthier...

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Also 89 hours to level 23 is un-fucking-acceptable leveling speed lmao.

Taking a year to max a main, in a game with a bajillion classes where I definitely want an alt or two, is just punishing.

Most interesting stat IMO other than Sloan’s /played

Nobody on any server has looted a single platinum

TJT said:

I am surprised Shaman is the most played class.

Absolutely no way I will sink actual time into these playtests. I got to level 3. Perfectly happy with the Wizard class though.

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Shaman and druid get run speed buff the fastest so not surprising IMO.

Most surprising to me is Inquisitor, figured more people would love to check out enchanter that can tank.

Hatorade said:

Shaman and druid get run speed buff the fastest so not surprising IMO.

Most surprising to me is Inquisitor, figured more people would love to check out enchanter that can tank.

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They say its shallow and unfinished

... said:

They say its shallow and unfinished

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That was my experience with it, but i got too frustrated with it to get into the double digits. Maybe it improves later.

I did not feel sufficiently powerful against caster mobs for how much ground i gave up against non-casters. Thing is, inquisitors already have a ton of abilities so i don’t know what they’re gonna do to avoid bloat.

dbl post

TJT said:

I am surprised Shaman is the most played class.

Absolutely no way I will sink actual time into these playtests. I got to level 3. Perfectly happy with the Wizard class though.

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Oof, I considered wizard for the next test. Looked at the spells on the wiki and no fucking thanks. To me it looks like they do marginally more damage than my fighter at level 12, but with the bonus of having to sit there and meditate for hours to get all the mana back to actually do it. Those nukes should be double what they are now.

My fighter hits for like 30 every 2 or 3 seconds (assuming I don't miss), plus my rent which is another 20-30 per every 8(?) seconds. And that's constant. Wizard lvl 12 nuke is 80. How many of those nukes do you suppose they can throw out before running out of mana?

Anyway, I agree with Quaid here, the first thing I noticed from those stats was it seems like people try it for a couple hours and then bounce out. That "friction" that people keep mentioning is way too much.