Lots of Feedback

[Koriath]

I realise there's a feedback thread, but this is going to be a loooooong post.
I played this some time ago, decided to try the test branch this time around.

Like I said last time: on the right path, and it shows major improvements.
I love the new movement, and how you get to leave the apartment for instance.
Rent and Food? Very nice, I like it. And with this, you managed to do away with the awfull "bit" system you had for coding. I like the new coding too.

Problems:
-During a Run, when you open Root and other windows, they default to... awfull positions. Specifically, they cover up the Mission Tracked, and I always have to move it to read the name of the file I'm downloading. And when you do something that opens that window, it... opens a second one? Why? I don't need two roots. Worse: the newer ones open with an offset that further covers the mission log.

-Speaking of root: why are we still using a console interface? Just throw a panel with options (HVAC systems should have 7-8 switches, you gotta press the right one for instance).

-Breaking UVP has several problems. I've played d6 systems before, so I undertood how it works. However, the Knowledge Base / Tutorial very poorly explains that Skill + Program Rating = dice pool. And that you need a number o sucesses over the node rating+system+host (I'm not even sure on this last one).
After a while, I noticed that with Cryptography 1 and a PassBreaker 1, it would be impossible to break any mission past 2. But that's after I googled this discussion board and found out how the dice pool is calculated. The game does not make it clear.
Sugestion: that UVP panel where you can insert a password that is pretty much useless right now? Replace the text field with several boxes. 1 for each sucess required.
When you execute a Passbreaker, the first few turn to Green/red if the roll suceeeded.
If the player doesn't have enough dice, please, inform the player that the roll they're attempting is impossible.

-Skill grinding:
I like that we need to train and gain skills, but please realise that some new player will press "C", and see 0/200 on his criptographic skill, break an UVP, press "C" and be greeted with an "1/200" proudly announcing that he'll have to break another 199 UVPs for a simple level up. Yes, you and I know it doesn't work like that, but a new player will go off what he perceives/notices.

-Rolling sucesses should give XP. 1 XP per sucess. Alternatively, 1XP per failure. Either of those let the player feel like he's still making progress even if he failed 20 rolls in a row, and offers dimishing returns if he keeps hacking low-difficulty targets

-The "mercy" mechanic I read on the forum about "keeping sucesses, re-roll failures" is straight up not working. I got to a system where I needed 4 sucesses, spent 10 minutes on the same UVP before breaking it, and when I got to a new node that required 5 sucesses, I promptly gave up. Without a mercy system, a d6 system tells the players: you require goal x3 dices to do this in a reasonable amount of rolls. Dificulty 5 requires 15, so, something like Cryptographic skill at 8 and a Passbreaker rating 7. I am many, many hours from this.

-The early game is already tedious (very little variation in the servers/tools used) but if a player gets distracted and presses "E" near the chair when he's at max neural stress? It's game-ending. You get a major injury, you cannot buy medpacks at that stage, so it will cost you 250$-300$ to fix that. Oh, yes, you can go into the debt, but now you're looking at somewhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour of game time to fix this mistake.
Since I didn't understood the new health system, I had these happen twice and found myself -800$ in debt. It actually takes less time to start anew then trying to fix that mess.
This needs to be revised. My sugestion: let the player start with 2-3 medkits. They can't buy them yet, but it lets them recover from a couple mistakes (and lets advanced players use them for some risky speed-leveling).

There's several awfull jumps/spikes in dificulty. Dificulty 1 and 2 missions can be done with the basic gear you receive at the start. Then I tried dificulty 3. The sword is useless, so if you have to bruteforce more than one mission, that's it for you.
So the player has two paths: he can make a Passbreaker 1 or a Breacher.
Breaching is pretty much awfull at this level. You need to breach, hit the ICE and you survive with 1/3 of your HP. then you enter another node, see another ICE and realize that's it for this run.
Alternatively, a player can code a Passbreaker 1, and farm dificulty 3 missions for a while while encountering NO ice at all. This leads to a very, VERY bad situation:
To start dificulty 4 missions, the player will need to buy new rotines (to spoof UVPs), need to upgrade his hardware (his programs are now slower) and spend time (aka rent/food money) to make the programs. Dificulty 3 missions pay 45$ a pop (if you subtract the initial investment) so you'll be at this for a while, level your Cryptographic skill once in the meantime. But then you enter Dificulty 4 and boy, welcome to Suffering:
>Programs take twice as long to complete
>you need more sucesses, so you'll be rolling many, many more times
>systems are bigger, you'll need to break more nodes to traverse them, refer to the previous 2 points
And if you get bored, try to Bruteforce to fight some ICE? You get murdered in no time because you didn't grind your Cyber Combat skill in dificulty 3 yet.

Dificulty scales in a non-linear manner, and this is poorly comunicated to the player.
You see a mission with a 3 and one with 4, and wonder how harder can it get? Then you try it and it's brutal. And this is more subjective, but I personally feel crushed when I see a list covered in missions with 5 and 6 dificulty, and think about how hard the 4 one's are and... I don't feel like playing anymore.

Bugs are a plenty, but I expected it in a test branch.
One hilarious one is that, I wrote a simple Passbreaker 2, but the variables didn't update properly. Heat, Memory and Complexity did, but instability stayed at 78% which I thought was normal (since I was upgrading and my programming skill was at 1).
Trying to hack with that piece of crap was actual torture. It constantly crashed or lowered to rating 1 (when I needed 4 successes to crack something) and while it constantly said it was generating heat, system heat never increased (guess that's bugged too).
But then my CodeKey breaker was done cooking and it had no instability. So I remade the Passbreaker 2, this time not-bugged, and it worked well. Or... well 3% of the time, because that's the odds you'll roll 4 sucesses without a mercy mechanic :\

My health started at 5 (and I could take 5 minor injuries) but 1 day in, and my health was at 1. I think nutrition was penalizing it, but the label for it states it's Fitness*5. I thought thhat if nutrition reached atleast 40%, it would bump my hehalth to 2, but no dice. Don't know how that system is working.

You might want to separate food from the bed menu. It took me a while to realize that I was eating chocolate to raise my dopamine, then going to sleep and waking with no doplamine. You CAN sleep and then eat, but it would definetly help if the screens were separated. I hope this system is expanded with a bar down the road.

The rig-building menu is still how I like BUT it's now very slow and unresponsive. Don't know what's causing it, my mouse pointer moves fine, but selecting chops is severely laggy. Only occurs on that screen.

Hope you continue the project, this is exactly my kind of dream game, and there's nothing close to "Uplink but with Cyberspace" and I'm looking forward for updates!

[Koriath]

One thing I forgot: when you're in the SAN, the Logout button has Green Text.
On other nodes, it's RED. This gives the player an idea that it's not safe to logout from other nodes. However, the tutorial doesn't mention it.
If the players don't notice it, they'll start taking a lot of neural stress before discovering it.
So, when they notice the two text colours, they'll start jumping to the SAN to leave, without realising that the map screen itself let's you logout safely. This is because the button on this map has grey text. Please include it in the Knowledge base or change the colour.

[nullray.gaming]

Thanks so much for the feedback, that's a very good report! I'll update my to-list =)

[DeNarr]

Gonna tack on some feedback here. These will be about the test version vs the stable.

Pros:
I like the human element to the game. Doing something outside feels a lot better than just walking back and forth from chair to the bed.
Fighting feels better.
The new way of gaining skills seems better, and more intuitive.
Moving to "Affording rent and food" is better than "forced contract to a company"

Cons:
The game (at least early game) is way more boring now.
- Codebreaking is super boring. I liked the old number puzzle. Now we just push a button.
- Getting through gates is boring, I liked the idea of being able to spoof a user or fight. Now it's just smack the gate til it goes down.
- The visual map is way more boring. Instead of freely being able to see the whole system, we're locked to one node at a time.
That flows into the next con, I hate the system map as a whole. More specifically, I hate that I might have to break into one node to get into an unrelated node. The "tiers" of the old system made way more sense. Especially when I'm triggering ICE just trying to explore.
The coding just doesn't seem to work at all. And if I'm somehow just messing up, then the tutorial / help needs a lot of work.
I'm not a fan of having to manually "Search System Summary Log" or whatever the file name, instead of being able to drag and drop. I know the files used to all be there and we had to search them out. Honestly, old system plus a simple filter would be best.
Should really give some contracts on the first day. Needing to sleep for no reason (and thus rack up debt) kind of sucks.

Sorry if this seems like a lot of negative vs positive. I love that the game has made progress, just frustrating when I know this game has a lot of amazing potential.