Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Thinking of playing salem? have a read of this
Luther1972
Member Posts: 7
Salem is fresh somewhat ground breaking mmo.
Most new mmo these days target the majority to try emulate Wow's success which in my opinion has led to the genre begining to stagnate.
Salem does things differently and for that I salute the designers.
The game is billed as: Salem the crafting MMO when actually Salem the Permadeath PVP mmo would be a more accurate title.
I am not normally a PVP player I tend to avoid it in most MMOs.
The concept behind the perma death is excellent imho and addresses something that i feel was a terrible flaw with EVE. That is that a group of greifers can smash hours / weeks/ months worth of work (kamakazie a multi billion cred freighter with 100k cred frigates) with no risk to themselves they may loose a clone or a 100k credit ship. if you track them down and kill them so what its just a clone.
in salem you need some relatively high end skills to be a ganker / greifer, trespassing, larceny, waste (destruction of property) and murder are all increasing difficult to learn. So in theory as a ganking sob loosing your character is a fairly big deal. Every time you committe a serious crime you leave a scent, which somebody can use to track you to your homestead (bind point), Once there they can summon you (even force you to log on if your ofline) and kill you permenantly. To me this seems like a wonderful idea as there are potentially geniune consequences for your actions.
In practise there are problems with this environment and the game:
Firstly the UI with the game as shipped is beyond awful. I can't list all the things that are wrong with it as they are just to many but a good example is that the default clients camera angle slowly rotates as you move to ensure that you get totally lost even over small distances. And yet the game allows custom UI like Ender (link below):
This customer client extends your mini map to x 9 size, shows resources as they pop into view on your mini map and many many other things. Its no exaggeration to say that using ender will double or triple your effectiveness over the first couple of weeks of play over somebody using the default client.
The Communitee.
I am not sure if its just this type of game attracts a certianly crowd or if all the nice people just wont speak to anyone but it has a very school yard atmosphere where people bully, betray and hurt each other becuase they can. Even some of the moderators on the forums (starjaxx) make posts trolling new people for asking questions. It leads to a general feeling of don't talk to anyone or accept help from anyone becuase it probably a trick and they just want to kill you and steal you stuff.
A case in point is on a new server a new player and his 2 RL friends were murdered by somebody who offered to join and help them within 2 weeks of the server starting. The murderer was somebody was a vet from another server who has specifically started on the new server to try to kill new people while they learnt the game. He did it in such a way there is no come back to him.
Balance
Currently it is possible for veteran players to get there stats (humours) so high they are all but immune to any defenses that can be built:
http://forum.salemgame.com/viewforum.php?f=6&sid=8541f67eb5e05042546d130a449868ab
To me this goes against the idea of consquences for your actions.
Support:
There is none. If there is a bug or somebody exploited to ignore your defenses and murdered everyone in your town or burnt everything to the ground, then tough. If people are using bots to get ahead and then use the power to kill you, then tough. At one stage people were pulling animals into boston and people were getting murder in the supposed safe zone and moderators response to this was you guessed it : tough luck! Although this bug has been fixed now for the future.
So a really interesting game, I stongly commend seatribe for developing something fresh and new. I am disappointed about the end result (but not in the way I am usually disappointed by new mmos these days).
Some poeple have suggested PVE servers in future. I have to say I cant see this working. So much of the atmosphere and need to build is a response to needing to defend against hostile players. Other than players the only things to fight in the game are rabbits, crickets, beavers, deer and bears, while intially challenging for a new player would not be enough to keep the game interesting.
My suggestions to the developers for improvement would be as follows:
Improve the UI alot or ban the custom UI's but dont hand people who use the custom UI a huge advantage over those who don't.
Improve your customer support, if you dont have money for GM's aleast make sure the moderators you have an freindly and helpful at all times.
Reduce the cap on stats to the point where it needs a large number of people to overcome the best defenses rather than just a few people with crazy high stats who can ignore most defenses.
Investigate and ban people for exploiting, especially when it leads to the destruction of other players or their property.
Do something for new players, perhaps a proper tutorial safe zone with limited buildings and skilling allowed.
in conculsion take a look at this game for a couple of weeks if you want to look at something new and fresh but its not going to be a revolution in its current state.
Comments
wall-o-txt batman..
while i agree with some of your points. a pure pve game wont work with how salem is setup. it will just promote more greifing as you wont beable to punish the griefer on a pve map.
that said, i dont see why you feel people using a modded client should be punished. yes seatribe fails at making useful default clients but its no reason to ban the end user for it. ender's client was used in their haven game as well, so its not going away lol...
as for the safe zone.. boston is a huge safe zone. more so now that they disabled monsters from attacking in/around it. but honestly the game is pretty easy to understand.
as for defence.. never going to see that balanced. in haven a person with high enough streight could bash the best walls or close to. with just a pickaxe/hammer.
salem people can get insanely high stats that can 1 hit walls and buildings so there wont be much balance there
best defence is to not beonline when they hit you so you dont lose the toon just junk that can be replaced in a few minutes.
if you have stuff you value over a toon.. put it on an alt (bank) and only log it in when you need/want it. (good items to bank are master keys, and leave just slaves accessable on your toon)
"It leads to a general feeling of don't talk to anyone or accept help from anyone becuase it probably a trick and they just want to kill you and steal you stuff." <- is salem in a nut shell, people can and will kill you for no reason, and will raid you just because they can.
ultimately you want to make it as costly as possible thats it. so triple plank or stone walls (plank is harder to make but better) and a ton of blazers and then leave low value items to betaken, any high value stuff put on an alt that you dont login until its needed.
best way to play games like salem.
AND FOR GOD SAKES close and lock your doors.. and keep them closed. >>" iv seen soo many noobs build split rail garbage fences and not lock them or even keep them closed.. a person doesnt have to bash a wall if the gate is wide open >>"
tldr x2.
imo. salem is a good game. but perma death in a crafting simulator is too harsh.
Nice read,
Salem is a very nice crafting sandbox mmo with permadeath, enjoying it, even as casual !
Sadly, this is all par for sandbox games. I've been saying it, and I'll keep saying it. The reason sandbox games fail is not because there is no market for them (see Minecraft). It's because nearly every developer becomes so pompous that their game is going to be so unique that it will succeed on that merit alone that they disregard things like balance, bugs, exploits, and customer support. Mortal Online, for example, looked very promising early on, but over time it became more and more apparent that it was going down that all-too-familiar road.
You realize you're saying that an acceptable alternative to balancing the game is for everyone to use unintuitive and undocumented exploits. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Problems with the game? Oh, that's okay. We already learned how to deal with all the bugs and have workarounds to everything. New players? Ha! If they can't learn the workarounds then they don't deserve to play our game!
The handful of players that stick with these sorts of games become so used to it all that fixing the problems would actually drive those players off. The game becomes locked in a state where it can never expand its tiny playerbase and see its full potential.
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
really good game, just getting into it.
brings fear of loss back into MMO. brilliant indeed
I think Salem is an object lesson for PvE players. The game is billed as a crafting game, in fact it is a PvP Permadeath game, that may or may not have been one of the Developers intentions, but it is not really advertised as such. The positive comments in this thread are from FFA PvP players, nothing wrong in that, but it does indicate that this is really an OW FFA PvP game.
You should think on this when deciding to play or not to play.