Re: What would make you come back to Geas?
Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2015 7:10 am
I'm a new player, and I have put about five days into Geas. I joined the game at the same time with seven of my friends from a different roleplaying game, all of whom, myself included, are experienced roleplayers. Commendably, a fair number of established players in Geas are friendly to new ones, and the majority of the roleplay that I have seen so far in Geas is well-done. I can understand why people have stayed with the game.
I can also understand why player retention is such a huge problem. I have been reading what other players have to say about Geas, and I've been asking questions -- and the more I learn about the game and its history, the less I like what I'm hearing and the less I want to continue playing. I won't go into what I've heard; much of it probably qualifies as gossip, which I won't repeat here. I will, however, list observations that my friends and I have made:
I can also understand why player retention is such a huge problem. I have been reading what other players have to say about Geas, and I've been asking questions -- and the more I learn about the game and its history, the less I like what I'm hearing and the less I want to continue playing. I won't go into what I've heard; much of it probably qualifies as gossip, which I won't repeat here. I will, however, list observations that my friends and I have made:
- Quite frankly, in my opinion, the game part of Geas is unenjoyable. As one of my friends put it: "I assumed everyone was just tolerating the gameplay to experience the RP."
- Besides fighting, there simply isn't much to do.
- The game is extremely time-consuming. Many skills require you to wait before you can use them again, and even if you use your time "efficiently" in training your skills, you still put an inordinate amount of time simply into raising skills -- time that you could have spent doing something actually enjoyable, such as roleplaying.
- Confusing and unintuitive syntaxes. If it weren't for helpful players, we probably wouldn't have been able to guess half of the syntaxes necessary to do things. In general, Geas is confusing, even to people who are familiar with MU*s.
- Broken or bugged features that, from reports, have been broken for quite some time now. Some of these are complex, and some of these are simple fixes.
- Some elements of game mechanics operate in ways that are nonsensical, unintuitive, and sometimes downright detrimental to fun. Particularly egregious offenders: armor management, random skill gain, reputation, coinage. One person mentioned that the mechanics could be more transparent.
- A lack of reasons to play. Okay, so I've ground two or three dozen skills to 100. So what? Now what? What am I going to spend all my money on? It seems like most people play because of the roleplay -- why not emphasize that?
- Did we mention the lack of things to do besides fighting?