Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Cukernaut said:

So for the folks that actually logged in and played I would love a legit no bs review of what’s there (forget about should be more zones blah blah).

rating only what’s there how was it?
Let’s pick a few categories:

combat/mechanics
Social / grouping
Economy
Immersion
Progression

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Did you miss xmod2's long post about it?

Cukernaut said:

So for the folks that actually logged in and played I would love a legit no bs review of what’s there (forget about should be more zones blah blah).

rating only what’s there how was it?
Let’s pick a few categories:

combat/mechanics
Social / grouping
Economy
Immersion
Progression

Click to expand...

Sure, here's the deal:
-The death penalty is being misunderstood by all the new testers. It's NOT an XP debt system, but everyone thinks it is. Even though it's not, or so they claim.
-All the mobs under level 5 are overpowered and shouldn't be one-shotting (or two-shotting) new players. They are, currently. This is apparently a known issue, but they let alpha testers in, anyway.
-There is a serious transaction related issue with their persistence system that prevented the original stress test, and instead led them to create servers with less than 20 concurrent players on them, for the tests this past week.
-Some of the bugs have been in the game for weeks, months or years. So long that many PA testers have developed workarounds for them, or merely accept them as features now.
-By Joppa's own admission in their official discord, some of the class defining abilities don't work properly. After years of testing.
-Their patching frequency is not fast, by any objective measure. The PA testers revealed that often many many months go by with zero patches, and they just work around the bugs.
-Some PA testers have tested for more than 1000 hours. There are PA guilds.
-All of the PA testers that have offered feedback or opinions in the official discord feel the game is perfect, the dev team is perfect, all the Alpha testers are morons, the general public are morons, Reddit is filled with morons, and nothing about the design and build of the game needs improvement. The sunk-cost fallacy is real. They are 100% emotionally and financially invested, and will never change their opinion. It is frightening how resounding the yes-men echo chamber really is.
-The Mastery system? The one that was supposed to be unique and amazing? Yeah, it doesn't work, at all, not even for one ability, for some classes. In all others, there's no choices, it's just a replacement for the I, II, and III ranks of every ability, just like every other game. Bad design, bad implemention. In almost all cases, once you finally spend 7 mastery points upgrading one ability, it's still underpowered, or best case, once completely maxxed out, is almost good enough to be effective.
-LAS is as bad as you would imagine, and you can't change weapons in combat. Yes, abilities are tied to specific weapons. Yes, this means you can't change abilities, weapons, or react dynamically to any changes in combat. It's exactly as bad as everyone thought it would be.
-The crafting system is a complicated mess of unnecessary tedium and illogical complexity. Nephele is proud of what he's created, and it's quite possibly more sadistic than any actual Hell that Silius created for Vanguard. It takes MANY minutes to harvest ONE resource. One. And you're competing with everyone else in your group to be the first to harvest that guarded node. Enjoy 50 levels of that no-hope PTSD nightmare of pain. Oh, and you'll never have enough bag space, nor bank space, nor money. The perfect trifecta of an amateur designed harvesting/crafting system.
-The game is dark. Everywhere, all the time. Even during daytime, it's too dark. Testers just stop testing at night, because they can't continue to test. There are no tools to combat this mechanic as of December 2023. All the devs and PA testers say they love 100% pure pitch black darkness with a 1m light falloff. They love it. They want players to be unable to test or play at night. When players die, because they can't fight, harvest, travel, see, or get their corpse? They love that shit. It's their primary reason for living, to drive players out of the game as soon as it gets dark. In fact, when players can't find their corpse? PA testers and devs both have a good laugh at the noobs, because that's what making social MMOs is all about. Laughing potential customers right out of the game. Nothing better than laughing at the dying noobs who haven't tested 1000+ hours in Pre-Alpha.
-There is one race, human, and of course, they're completely blind at night.
-There is one zone. And no, it's not very big. And no, it's not finished. And no, it's not polished. Yes, it's very, very buggy. Yes, it's utterly forgettable and one place looks almost identical to any other place due to the repetition of world geometry and style. Mobs get stuck on world geometry. Mobs fall through the world. Players get stuck constantly. Players fall through the world. Water doesn't work. But there's a re-use timer on /stuck or /unstuck or whatever the hell the command was, because of course, testers will abuse that, like it's post-launch or something, if you let them use it more than once per hour.
-There is no /bug report option, in-game.
-Climbing is a busted as you could imagine. Sometimes, you walk, sprint, or otherwise approach a cliff, and you start to climb down. Sometimes, you fall to your death. There is no consistent method to guarantee you will actually start climbing DOWN a lethal cliff. Walk backwards with shift? Nope. Walk forwards with shift? Nope. Run forwards with shift? Nope. Use any combination of run, walk, shift, non-shift? Nope, completel 100% inconsistent. But at least they re-did all the zones to incorporate this busted-ass broken mechanic. It's a gimmick, and nothing more.
-Most of the graphics options do nothing or at the very least, don't positively affect anything visually in-game. Some of the graphics options make the game look fugly. Some of the graphics options don't do anything when you change them. Can't say it any clearer than that.
-The only way the game performs even slightly reasonably is if you reduce FPS to 30. Any FPS higher than that and it's consuming more than half the GPU of a 4090, regardless of any or all other settings.
-Everything, including crafting, harvesting, looting, and adventuring is competitive. This is not a co-op game. Even grouped, you're always stealing from your friends. In all the ways that could solve these issues and expand the target audience to sustainable numbers the dev team has confirmed they will NEVER change their design. You will ALWAYS be stealing from your friends, forever, doing anything and everything, by design, working as intended.
-It is a very real concern (among the testers I talked to, in-game) that there will never be enough players to sustain even one server, even if every pledge, every Reddit subscriber, every Discord user, every family and friend word of mouth potential player played the game? It won't be enough, because of their amateur-hour design philosophies. Concurrency throughout the week of Dec 18-22 was double digits (less than 50), best case, per server.
-There is no sensible or logical economic design to speak of. Every RMT and MUDflation mistake of the past is being repeated at every step of every action within the economy. Gold sellers are guaranteed.
-Dead and/or dying creatures cast and land abilities. Players can cast abilities on dead and/or dying creatures, even though they don't do anything, it still burns the cooldowns.
-The whole design of creating combat resources in combat is poorly done. Some of these resources expire very quickly while out of combat. Some don't. Some generate on fixed timers and cannot be generated by any other means except the passage of real time. The whole fundamental role differentiator are these mechanics, and they're not well done. They either haven't been tested, or whoever designed them has never done anything similar before, and the amateur nature of their skill set is glaringly obvious.
I need to be specific here; Some classes only generate resources they need for combat while in combat, but if they don't stay in combat, those resources expire. However, all the support classes only generate primary combat resources while NOT in combat. This creates the very tangible conflict of tank/DPS classes wanting to be in combat constantly, and support/healers wanting to be out of combat to recover, and as a consequence, teamwork is not cooperative, but rather, antagonistic. It will only get worse as the levels progress. Some classes MUST be in combat, for a very very long time, doing nothing but auto attacking, in order to generate enough of their class-specific role resources. As in, 4 or 5 entire TTKs just to get to the point where they have enough of their class/role specific resource to be able to perform their role for one fight. That's how bad this design philosophy is. And that resource generation from auto attack? NOT normalized by weapon delay/dmg. Yeah, after 9+ years.
-The group interface bugs out when players join or leave the group. Yep, after 9+ years.
-full group wipes fighting yellows, oranges and/or reds are constant, demoralizing, toxic, and bug ridden. Death loops are common. Groups disbanding after one wipe, also common. If this design remains the same through to launch, only the most dedicated sadists will ever considering playing it, because it's all Risk and no Reward. Emergent behavior will be to never take any risks, because the setback from death is so incredibly Risky. It's worse than EQ1 in all the ways EQ1 was bad, and not as good as EQ1 in all the ways EQ1 was good. Trying to revive downed players is inconsistent, doesn't work, or sometimes works. And if you do manage to revive someone? They get a debuff just to be sure you can't do that again.
-There are no lull spells for all the content that requires it, at least not for all the high density camps in the first 5-8 levels. Why put content in place that no-one can consume without dying repeatedly? Oh right, sadism.
-on the surface, if someone had never played anything better, an inexperienced QA tester might feel this game is good or good enough, after 9+ years. It's not. It's a novel experience for people who are optimistic, and a tedious repeated failure for anyone with any experience in testing or playing MMOs since EQ1.
-After 9+ years of design and build effort (regardless of how the zealots might retcon it) this is an embarassing result, objectively. The money is gone, and they have SFA to show for it.
-I have less confidence now than I ever did in the technical and design skill of the dev team and the company as a whole to bring this product to a public launch state. I can't see how they could ever do it, and certainly not within many more years, even if by some miracle they could produce the content required for 3 continents, 9 races, 12 classes, and 5 tiers/50 levels of 3 game loops. And even if all that came true by some miracle? It would still be a mediocre MMO with insufficient innovation to gather a sustainable population.
-In my opinion, showing the product off in this state (in December, 2023) will do more lasting harm than good to the project, and was a mistake.

-The death penalty is being misunderstood by all the new testers. It's NOT an XP debt system, but everyone thinks it is. Even though it's not, or so they claim.

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I died one time saving the tank and group on a pull (they got away). I got about 10% of xp extra on kills after that even after I dinged, I think its a little too generous myself. No clue where you got this idea....

-All the mobs under level 5 are overpowered and shouldn't be one-shotting (or two-shotting) new players. They are, currently. This is apparently a known issue, but they let alpha testers in, anyway.

Click to expand...

didnt happen to me once across 2 chars

-There is a serious transaction related issue with their persistence system that prevented the original stress test, and instead led them to create servers with less than 20 concurrent players on them, for the tests this past week.

Click to expand...

we had at least 24 one time I checked

-By Joppa's own admission in their official discord, some of the class defining abilities don't work properly. After years of testing.

Click to expand...

like what? everything I used on cleric and enc were fine. buddy played pally/war, no issues at all. No one in my groups on dire lord, rogue, shaman, wizard etc complained once.

-The game is dark. Everywhere, all the time. Even during daytime, it's too dark.

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stopped reading here LOL, this guy sucked at the game - likely extremely butt hurt by the remote challenge it possesses in the early levels. None of what he's said is close to true. He only posts within this thread on the board, and every single post from him is trying to hate the game out of existence or delusional.

Nirgon said:

we had at least 24 one time I checked

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Whoa now, what happened to the nine 100+ player servers?

Sounds like there's a few hundred max, not over a thousand.

You realise WoW Classic is now running world PvP with over a hundred players on screen without lag at once?

I think I've done a Battle for Ashenvale with more players than Pantheon's total server cap across all servers.

I randomly did a /who at like 4am (real questing hours), anecdotal

I'm not surprised you're paying for lvl 25 WoW content, in fact I would have bet you were

Nirgon said:

I'm not surprised you're paying for lvl 25 WoW content, in fact I would have bet you were

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I've spent less money on WoW Classic than you've spent on Pantheon.

What level content are you paying for lmao.

Here what i dont understand once they create the summoner class. How are going they going to deal with the lag of all those pets and summoned items now? Unleaa they intend to go the way of vanguard with small server size. This is why you do pet pathing first. That why guk was so fucked up in the beginning and people just learned to out grow it than to deal with it.

Mr. Sox said:

Here what i dont understand once they create the summoner class. How are going they going to deal with the lag of all those pets and summoned items now?

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They won't.

Chris said:

I've spent less money on WoW Classic than you've spent on Pantheon.

What level content are you paying for lmao.

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He quit wow because in that expac where they shit out legendaries, he got the max number of legendaries, and then they lied to him about the cap and so he thought he could farm even more legendaries but was actually at the secret and lied about max. He then quit and hated on the game.

He is basically a jilted blizzard ex girlfriend, who probably played wow more hardcore than anyone else in this thread.

Mr. Sox said:

Here what i dont understand once they create the summoner class. How are going they going to deal with the lag of all those pets and summoned items now? Unleaa they intend to go the way of vanguard with small server size. This is why you do pet pathing first. That why guk was so fucked up in the beginning and people just learned to out grow it than to deal with it.

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This is by far Pantheon's #1 problem

But do they have a boob slider for all the body type 2s out there

BoozeCube said:

Goddamn I know graphics aren't that important to making a fun game but I at least expected more than some Atari level shit.

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Ya, sub WoW like this guy

xmod2 said:

I can confirm it's all pretty consistent with what I experienced. The game was only 'hard' because it was clunky. If the engine was fluid and the abilities weren't laggy, it would be trivial for anyone except mouth breathing retards. We held the 'super hard' undead camp with a single healer that had some shitty hot and an enc that could barely get mez to land. The only challenge was figuring out what was going on and what abilities were firing because the feedback wasn't great. There was no tactical or strategic challenge other than 'mez add' which dad's have been doing in EQ for 20+ years.

Also, I have a thrilling video of me sitting in the dark hitting a 'wild vegetable' for 50 seconds. While exploring and climbing the edges of the maps, at night I would basically just run blind into walls. I did get good at climbing by the end though.

View attachment 505643

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Total miss from the people I was in voice with. Maybe we just have super nice computers.

Pantheon could literally fill Nirgon's mouth with shit and he would tell us all what an amazing experience we're missing out on. True believer no matter what.

I'll stream it next time if they allow it

You ppl are fucked

Nirgon said:

I'll stream it next time if they allow it

You ppl are fucked

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What will that change? There's already streaming footage from their most recent builds.

Will you run to the invisible walls of the zone for us?

DickTrickle said:

What will that change? There's already streaming footage from their most recent builds.

Will you run to the invisible walls of the zone for us?

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No he's going to stream them filling his mouth with shit.