The Frustration of Memories of Mars

[Six String Samurai]

Hey Folks

I've put... I think steam said 56 hours into this game so far.

That's alot of active farming.

I've been running around with a crew of streamers. having a mary old time.

We are on a pvp server, one with the "very dedicated" chinese crew. US west I think? Doesn't matter.

Point is...

Memories of Mars is a great concept, with a flawed game design.

Let me do my best to break it down with constructive feedback.


Survival games, by their very nature, require teams to overcome their frustrations in order to get back into the fight after losing PvP. That's fine.

However, in this game, there is no catch up mechanic.

If my base, my items, and all my things are wiped off a server, I will forever be at a disadvantage there after.

This "very dedicated" chinese group? Just lost you customers, because of your game design. You now have people who will never log back into your game because of it.

And why?

Well simple, because in the absence of our time or effort or knowledge of where and when to farm what and how, they were able to excelerate their farming to such a point that everyone elses efforts were absolutely useless.

When our base is destroyed, we lose everything we don't log off with...

thats kinda bad design in and off itself, because you could also just give us a personnel storage vault that we can put items in that can never be stolen from... but I digress...

For us to come back and compete with an enemy who has such a massive lead...is impossible. We cannot build the explosives to attack their base back. We cannot build the items to fight them in the field.

We cannot rebuild a base, they cannot wipe out faster then we can collect items.

While you all may be going "Uhhh... that's how survival games work!"

I pose to you this simple question... why?

If part of your game design is no catch up mechanic, the lead dogs continue to lead, we have no identifying way to figure out who and how to fight what enemies...

I think you may have just lost my business as well.

And not because I don't mind coming back into the fight, but because my recourse of action is to replay content that never allows me the chance to catch back up to the enemy. I do not have a chance at revenge, or recovery... until the next season, 5 weeks from now.

So...my recreational time will then be spent elsewhere for 5 weeks, I'll be plugged into another social group, and my chances of being a continuing player in your world shrink.

This happened in several mmo's in the early days of competing with WoW.

Shadowbane, DAOC, Ultima... there were design flaws that were left behind in base building issues.

For example...

In Shadowbane you would take 3 months to fully build a massive city base with 70 people.

3 hours to tear it down.

Rather then having all buildings be live, the entire time... they created something called the bane stone.

The bane stone was placed by the attacker, and then the defender had 96 hours to set when the siege would go live within the next week.

The defender had to destroy the bane stone, before the attack could destroy the Tree of Life (the base piece that protected all other parts of the city).

Shadowbane, however, suffered from the exact same issue of no catchup mechanics, on a similairly small map.


What I am trying to get at is this...

Your design has been through play tests before, and I get that its early access... but your demolition charge cost is too high, because the items come from random spawns that are incosistent in their collection of.

Your base mechanics are aimed at allowing the person with the most time spent farming, to win.

And you have no way in which a person who has lost everything can return to a level of competition in this season.

In short, your design will drive away players from the game, in turn giving your high end groups no one to pick on, in turn leading to them stopping play, in turn leading to less servers, lower population, and a continous downward spiral of rotation.

It's occured before, and I went through it in a game I loved until that game shutdown.

I hope this all makes sense... and while I am very frustrated about all of this right now... I really have faith in this dev team to be able to recognize the issue of the common player vs. the top end player super competative players / super farmers, and figure out that this game, as it stands right now, is going to have diminishing returns on audience as a game design feature.

[Heart]

Hi Six String Samurai
I have had a good read of your feedback and thought I'd share some further information.

First lets address the idea of a catch up mechanic. In a few weeks time (read during season 2 still) we are planning to implement a pretty large patch. This patch essentially addresses the first 10 hours of the game, giving players a much easier progression path to start, more information on what you can and can't do in the game as well as a large balancing pass on top.

This in and of its self will make the scenario of losing everything in a raid easier to handle and get back to where you were. Even just getting to the original 'break point' will be easier.

Regarding large groups of players (or lets just use Hardcore vs Casual) dominating everything. It's a difficult one. You've even mentioned countless games above that fell foul to this. I'll add in Darkfall as I'm also a huge Sandbox MMO player.

I actually spoke on this in Discord a little while ago, as someone had a very similar question. I wont copy and paste it here (it's quite long) but if you join the Discord I'm happy to point you in it's direction as it might shed some more light on our thought process in this very manner.(maybe you're already on the Discord and saw my discussion with a player named Brimm).

Briefly though. Being able to play on any official server ruleset (pvp/pve currently) and taking your progression with you, can help lower the potential frustrations (this will be fully implemented end S2/start of S3). We don't just have to stop on PvP and PvE as rule sets either, a current Runescape server approach is being discussed (you would have to see how they handle it if you're unaware).

The introduction of more ways to either automatically defend your base, preserve some items or simply know who attacked you are all things we're looking to implement.

We also have the current low player base to take into consideration, which will increase when we begin marketing. As is, happening right now our dedicated groups have started to moderate each other (arguably as they are the only ones to fight with but still). This thought process scales though.

Thanks for taking the time to give us some dedicated feedback. It's greatly appreciated.

To close. We're aware of essentially everything you've said. This is a true Early access for us. That means we have lots of content planned, to come. We also implement a lot of features directly requested by the community as well as doing fortnightly community balance discussions to make sure we're following the path most travelled (happens on Discord).

Base raiding, by its very nature is one of the latter things for us to really 'perfect', for want of a better term. This is mainly due to us wanting feedback, like you've given us, to ensure that we know we're going in the right direction for such a fundamental part of the game. Season 1 we really wanted to nail down balance, weapon handling and building. Season 2 bought us a lot of well liked changes in these areas. Season 2-3+ look to see more 'catch up' (early game) and base raiding focus, among other things (new flop events, enemies, vehicles, more lore, more opportunities to spread out what you farm etc..)
Also I should point out that the above things are planned and some even in the coding phase already, it's not just a talking point for us.

Dan

[eon]

Hi six played on the same server this very dedicated chinese team as you call them completely took down 15/20 bases in 1 afternoon of farming how can that be possible. I went back in to same server spent a few hours rebuilding , log out for a bit come back in to find them taking the last bit of my new base down. Game over . and Brimm was on the same server off to find out what he said about this dedicated chinese team.

[Six String Samurai]

Thanks Heart, I'll get in on the discord and join the discussion more actively.

I am looking forward to some numbers releases on weapon damages and armor reductions, as well as some of these new catch up mechanics.

Thank you for the reply. It means alot.

[BushMaster]

https://memoriesofmars.gamepedia.com/Weapons#Weapons_Damage_Comparison

this may help

[wag]

I think steam said 438 hours into this game so far...

[zroc]

obviously game has huge exploit devs can't seem to locate and/or address. all is lost.. bases, and player.. bye bye

[alexcazoro]

i need help

[alexcazoro]

can it plays with ps4 controller???