I logged in to see what things looked like in AWS. The experience was not good all in all, but let me start with the positives. I played for 1.5 hours or so, and didn't seem to get any green boxes or severe lag that plagued AWA. That's really good news. The world is seamless as promised. The graphics are better as promised. The map feature is better overall, the "fog of war" on the map is a good thought. Making notes on the map works fine. All chats seem to work fine. The good elements of the interface all seem to work as intended. The tutorial is not so bad, but I did not try to complete it. I hear it's broken. New player inauguration seems to be slightly improved. My stuff all seems intact, so the transfer of items and skills was clean.
My primary objective was to get to Saransk to see if my junk was still there, and here's where you begin to see big problems. Even if I knew where I was going, which I don't, it's a 30 minute run I'm told. It takes me over an hour. Thanks to Pila for giving me some assistance. So over the course of an hour, I have a chance to see the countryside - the bottom line is you've got a huge empty world. There's nobody and no mobs in QA1 it seems. In a one hour run, I pass less than 10 mobs, and they seemed to not be in schools but just random off by themselves, or one or two of them at a time. Most of them are huge mobs that a new player couldn't hope to survive. So I presume that mob skilling is basically out of the question after about 30 minutes of running. They haven't been sorted out well enough - clearly no thought has gone into mob placement. So what's left to do in AW? Well, you could pick stones, but I'm immediately told most of them are still not pickable. This is absurd of course, and I can't believe there's still non-pickable stones. I assume that will be fixed soon. So what does that leave? Well, it leaves chopping at trees, which is what every online player is doing. It was common knowledge inside the game that there is currently a tree exploit, and I assume the devs are aware of that. [note: I didnt' say anything about the nature of the exploit]
So we've got a massive (wayyyyy too massive world - a world that supposes transportation but doesn't actually have any) with nothing to do in it, or nothing that can be done efficiently or even reasonably efficiently anyway. It's all just spinning one's wheels going nowhere. Hence there are about half a dozen players in this huge world total, all chopping trees, all old veteran players (since no new player would bother just chopping trees endlessly). All of the focus really should go into making QA1 a liveable place...and then work outwards from there. My suspicion is that Dedicated Logic has manpower to make more land area, but not enough manpower to fix that world and make it liveable, let alone fun. All of the development should focus solely on gameplay as much as possible. Making more landmass that nobody's ever going to see - and frankly no one ever asked for or cares about - is obviously not helpful to the game's overall success. The map could have been 5km and nobody would complain as long as there were things to do there, as long as there was something like a game to be played.
Sorry for griping. Hopefully the next update focuses on making the game playable again. I like AW, I'm sure it'll get fixed and I'll be back to my old ways. The components for a good game are all there, they just need to be sorted out, and some thought needs to go into each skill and what would make it seem fun and worthwhile. Right now the only kind of person that could justify playing the game is someone who just liked virtual sight seeing.
...and now for some old veteran players to tell me how wrong I am...
