Impressions on Nostalrius so far

[minikN]

Hello.

I am a level 10 Orc Hunter now. After the first 10 levels, I thought I should take a step back and think about what impression the server has made to me, and to be honest - it mostly disappointed me. But before I go on explaining this as objectively as I can - let me say this: This is just MY opinion, you may or may not share. You may or may not like what I say, you may disagree completely. That's all okay - I'm open for a conversation, but I won't even bother answering brainless comments.

So - why has Nostalrius disappointed me so far? Let me try to explain that. Nostalrius was hyped beforehand like crazy. Along with some other projects (I think I'm not allowed to mention here) Nostalrius was the first well developed server in line to release. We all saw the well developed homepage along with all the youtube videos that made us sweat. WoW what it was used to be - that was what I thought. Enough of this f**nix nonsense.

Well, to make it short, I had high expectations. The site and the videos teased us. But before I'll explaing what actually disappointed me - let me point out this: Chances are that Nostalrius is the best blizzlike vanilla server yet - yep, absolutely possible. The raid content might me perfectly scripted, but here's the thing: We don't know that yet, we even haven't got a max character yet, so all I can say about Nostalrius at this point is what the server had to offer in the first levels - more importantly - I believe that a server, that wants to differentiate itself from the mass, HAS TO provide more in those low level areas than other servers, because that is what players will see first. Based on that impression they will form their opinion. Just like I did.

But what do I mean with "provide more"? Surely this is a blizzlike server, nothing to budge there. With more I mean content where work flowed in. A certain level of detail. This is where Nostalrius failed me. I can remember one video about WSG, saying that even the positions of the buff objetcs have been fixed slightly because they weren't blizzlike. I thought "wow, that's some dedication". Well, didn't see any of this in the starting zones.

To finally specify what bugged me, here a short excerpt of what I picked up during levelling. Please not that this is not a full bug report. I don't expect any of these to be fixed, I'm just writing down what I've noticed.

* Lazy Peons was bugged (Has been hotfixed apparently)
- However after you hit one with the stick he should instantly get up and start working. Instead he keeps sleeping for about 2-4 secs and then gets up.
* The drunk effect Bom'bay buffs you does not wear of as it should
* The quest you get from opening benedict's chest is bugged because the chest is empty.
* Not to mention the flametongue shaman bugs that have already been reported
* I heard people saying mage's arcane missiles are bugged (can't confirm this)
* The harpys flying above nests in Drygulch Ravine are bugged and can not be attacked (most of them)
* Hunter quest contains more than 1 bug
- After taming a pet for the quest it does not follow the player automatically, although the follow stance is turned on.
- After dismissing a pet for the quest it should either disappear instantly or attacked you (I can't remember what it is supposed to do exactly). However here it attacks for 1 or 2 ticks and then just idles the world until a guard kills it or I don't know.
* I also noticed some pathing bugs, basically mobs zigzag charging me. I don't really mind this, but considering your videos about the pathing system - where you even fixed retails bugs I found that quite funny.

I'm sure I noticed more than just these issues, but I've probably forgotten about them. As I said I wasn't writing them down, this is just what is still present. I'm sorry to say but considering only the first 10 levels - all in all - this just looks like plain Mangos with some tweaks here and here. I mean come one, Lazy Peons not working? Hunter quest not working properly?
I don't know how you guys feel about that - but considering the massive hype, things like that really disappointed me.

I don't mean to harm the server reputation, or to piss at the staff or ANYTHING like that - just sharing my thoughts. Peace.

[Hatson]

Yeah the server has some bugs so far, but far less than any other private I've played on, that's for sure.

What's strange is that some of the bugs you mentioned weren't bugged at all for me.
F.ex. Benedict's Chest was fine for me and all my party members.
And I've never seen any mob zig zag charge, the only pathing issues I've found is sometimes when running around corners of walls, the mobs sometimes stop and look at you, not sure how to approach you - this makes some fights in dungeons and specific areas exploitable. (If this isn't fixed soon, people will exploit it a lot, for now it's nothing major exploited).
I've not heard of any arcane missile bugs from my mages when I asked them. But not sure about that.
Lazy peons worked fine for me at release. I don't know when it broke, but it wasn't on first few hours of launch.

I wouldn't know about Hunter bugs. I'm playing a Shaman myself and all the quests work fine. The only Shaman bugs I've found so far is the ~0,5% chance on Rockbiter to also do flametongue effect on hit (barely even noticeable bug), and Lightning Shield not having any downtime between discharging itself (more neat than anything, really, but... still a bug)

[Elaith]

Only lvl 11 and haven't run into anything truly groundbreaking as far as bugs go, more little things like mob animations not firing properly (defias bandit kick animation for example), and occasionally getting a 'no loot' error when trying to loot the horse feed in the Westfall q. Apart from that the only issue would be the un blizz like respawn rates in both mobs and prof nodes.

[Tomerant]

actually EVERYTHING you mentioned above works on vanilla realm where I have 60 char (x1 realm too)...

Considering dcs I get and all the bugs I read about ... I wonder why the fk am still here.

[Avshar]

many quests with an event dont work,, for example The pyrewood ambush, the counterattack and so on.. so yea, the low level content is pretty much bugged and it looks like it hasnt been tested at all..

I am just hopin that the end game content works perfectly

[Ivina]

Hi,

You are right on almost everything, but maybe should put things in perspective.

1) You are 100% right that at this step, the server will be compared to other servers only upon the quality of low level scripts. I however don't expected this to be the strength of this server.

The core and scripts of the server are an in-heritage from the French Nostalrius. On that server, players used to start at level 55. Thus, most of the development was focused on HL areas (especially dungeons and raids). Most of the development on low level zones has probably been done during the last mouthes, for the release of Nostalrius begins.

Honestly, when I started playing, I was surprised by the quality of low level content. I was expecting Nostalrius to have more issues at low level. But still, yes, there are a couple of bugs left.


2) There are every evening 5k people playing here in lvl 1 to ~30 areas. This is a very intense testing no other server can pretend to have.
If we list all bugs those 5k people have found, I am sure we keep the number of bugs under 100. In that list, maybe less than 10 bugs could be classified as "important".
It might seem a lot to your eyes, but I personally find this ridiculously low, considering the complexity of the game.

You seems to have experienced other private servers that were not fully scripted, and I am sure you realize that if we had to count bugs on such servers, it would not be around 100, nor 200, but thousands.


3) Be cautious with the list of bugs that are reported by random people on the forum and on the world chat. Seriously, at least half of those bugs actually aren't bugs.

I've seen countless people reporting LOSs in WSG, while nostalrius just made it on purpose, to stick to the vanilla version. You can, like me, prefer to have better LOSs instead of the vanilla version, but we definitively can't call this a bug!

There are also bugs that are summoned on forums when speaking about Nostalrius, while they already have been fixed. That's just a form of trash-talk and defamation. I must admit it is also Nostalrius fault for not publishing fix log in a visible way.


4) What will probably happen is that more bugs will be discovered in higher level zones and dungeons, because the higher the levels, the more complex is the content. The list will grow, but the current rate is not a concern in my opinion! If the current total list of bugs is shorter than 100 bugs, then it means everything can be fixed within a decent time. Nostalrius would be the first server where you can actually expect to have every single bug to be fixed in a short or medium term future.


5) Lastly, I don't tell this especially for you, but for everyone: don't be naive with other projects' propaganda. You can't blame them for doing this, but keep your criticism sense on. Of course they will list our bugs and say they are fixed on their side. Of course they won't tell you when our "bugs" are already fixed or just were false reports. Of course they won't tell you about the list of bugs they have but are fixed on Nostalrius. Of course they won't tell you their content was tested by having 300 players, not 5k. Be sure that the more desperate they are, the more lies you will read.

[Beabington]

Enjoying this server immensely, especially the stability. Keep up the g00d work, staff.

[minikN]

Yeah the server has some bugs so far, but far less than any other private I've played on, that's for sure.

What's strange is that some of the bugs you mentioned weren't bugged at all for me.
F.ex. Benedict's Chest was fine for me and all my party members.

I also heard about people having no problem with Benedict's Chest. My thoughts are that it comes down to when you try to loot the Chest. I could be wrong, but it looks like it has a global respawn timer - so in other words the key's in the box for everyone - or not. Which resulted in 80% looting an empty box. I even could have been bothered waiting for it to respawn, but once you loot it, whether it's full or not - your key is gone and you have to kill benedict again. Surely not how it's suppose to work.
About the Lazy Peon quest. For me personally it wasn't bugged, apart from that little bug I mentioned where they don't get up immediately, but I heard that it was undoable for the first few hours after release. What bugs me here is, that Lazy Peons is the first quest to encounter that is not simply "kill 10 of this, pickup 5 of that". It's the first "interactive" quest (at least for orcs/trolls).. well and the first bugged one. Bummer.

Only lvl 11 and haven't run into anything truly groundbreaking as far as bugs go, more little things like mob animations not firing properly (defias bandit kick animation for example)

Reading that I realised that I've encountered the same thing. When fighting mobs underwater they surely have the swim animation when charging you, but the attack animation is the same as it would be on solid ground. I noticed that with the crawlers on echo island. He would swim charge me, but then stand on invisible ground (underwater) and attack me. But this is so barely noticeable that even I forgot about it.

[minikN]

Hi,

You are right on almost everything, but maybe should put things in perspective.

1) You are 100% right that at this step, the server will be compared to other servers only upon the quality of low level scripts. I however don't expected this to be the strength of this server.

The core and scripts of the server are an in-heritage from the French Nostalrius. On that server, players used to start at level 55. Thus, most of the development was focused on HL areas (especially dungeons and raids). Most of the development on low level zones has probably been done during the last mouthes, for the release of Nostalrius begins.

Honestly, when I started playing, I was surprised by the quality of low level content. I was expecting Nostalrius to have more issues at low level. But still, yes, there are a couple of bugs left.


2) There are every evening 5k people playing here in lvl 1 to ~30 areas. This is a very intense testing no other server can pretend to have.
If we list all bugs those 5k people have found, I am sure we keep the number of bugs under 100. In that list, maybe less than 10 bugs could be classified as "important".
It might seem a lot to your eyes, but I personally find this ridiculously low, considering the complexity of the game.

You seems to have experienced other private servers that were not fully scripted, and I am sure you realize that if we had to count bugs on such servers, it would not be around 100, nor 200, but thousands.


3) Be cautious with the list of bugs that are reported by random people on the forum and on the world chat. Seriously, at least half of those bugs actually aren't bugs.

I've seen countless people reporting LOSs in WSG, while nostalrius just made it on purpose, to stick to the vanilla version. You can, like me, prefer to have better LOSs instead of the vanilla version, but we definitively can't call this a bug!

There are also bugs that are summoned on forums when speaking about Nostalrius, while they already have been fixed. That's just a form of trash-talk and defamation. I must admit it is also Nostalrius fault for not publishing fix log in a visible way.


4) What will probably happen is that more bugs will be discovered in higher level zones and dungeons, because the higher the levels, the more complex is the content. The list will grow, but the current rate is not a concern in my opinion! If the current total list of bugs is shorter than 100 bugs, then it means everything can be fixed within a decent time. Nostalrius would be the first server where you can actually expect to have every single bug to be fixed in a short or medium term future.


5) Lastly, I don't tell this especially for you, but for everyone: don't be naive with other projects' propaganda. You can't blame them for doing this, but keep your criticism sense on. Of course they will list our bugs and say they are fixed on their side. Of course they won't tell you when our "bugs" are already fixed or just were false reports. Of course they won't tell you about the list of bugs they have but are fixed on Nostalrius. Of course they won't tell you their content was tested by having 300 players, not 5k. Be sure that the more desperate they are, the more lies you will read.

Hello Irvina, I am very thankful for that post. This is the kind of discussion I was aiming for.
You are right about falsely reported bugs, even I ran into people screaming about bugged mechanics, which are in fact blizzlike. One guy blamed the feed pet system to be bugged, because it would get hungry so fast again. I had to explain the companion levels to him, and how they, together with the food itself influence the pets hunger.
So you are surely right about that. I don't believe a bug to be present, until I experience by myself. I play a hunter, but also listed two other class bugs, I only did this because I did not hear one guy mentioning them, but many.
I also understand your point in low level vs. high level content. Bugs like the Lazy Peons quest are absolutely not important once you did (or skipped) the quest. But class bugs are bugs, that are present whether you are level 1 or 60. So for example talking about the shaman bugs that are present, they still will be present at lvl 60. I'm curious whether they will affect class balance in raid content. Maybe not the bugs I've mention, but maybe other bugs that will appear.
What I'm trying to say is, if this server has focused on raid content rather than starting zones that's alright, I can live with that, we all want to raid or pvp at one point. But the fact that bugs in class mechanics are already present makes me wonder what bugs we will face in 1 or 2 months raiding or pvping. Of course this is all speculation.

To your last point. You are right here as well. I think I have to make one point clear: I don't expect any private server, no matter how much work flowed into it to be 100% bug free, I think that is something impossible to achieve. Even blizzard did not have one single patch note without various bug fixes. So you have a fair point saying that other servers propaganda should be looked at with criticism. The question that appears tho is, will bugs be fixed in a timely manner, no matter how little they are. This is something that would determine me staying on this server or not.

Thanks.

[Blackadder]

I can't stress enough how wonderful it is to kill mobs, die in the process , corpse run 10 miles through the barrens and find the lootable body still intact WITH YOUR QUEST ITEM. This feature alone does me make forgive 10 minor bugs.

And i think lvl 1-10 is not the best time to evaluate this server especially given the fact that you had a rough time during those levels with a lot of waiting and searching and more waiting and running around aimlessly only to wait more.... .. This might have an influence on your verdict. I think you would have had a better experience when all mobs were present and you could go through the start content in a more 'normal' way , let's say in a week or two when the first big wave of casual players has reached lvl 30+