Strangest thing that happened to you ingame?

It really depends on what difficulty you are fighting it and at what level you are fighting it at. Story version should be a breeze, but challenge and extreme version can be challenging if you don't have a good group.

 

Takes a while to find a group simply by waiting, but it shouldn't be too hard to form a group by going to a populated location and asking for help. I think for new players, it's a bit more difficult, because they're not as acclimated with the long-time players, so it would be harder for them to request for help. But for someone who's played the game for a long time and probably has a full friend list, it shouldn't really be a problem.

 

A strange thing would be not see anyone do that boss at all. People who dailies go there and items from the boss are very nice looking and have good stats for that level range. Ashfall can keep players busy for 5 whole levels assuming that's how long they will stay there while leveling.

 

I think the best time to do dailies is around midnight when the quest reset rolls over, because there will usually be an influx of players around that time. And even if you get disconnected once, you can probably go back to where you were and find other players doing dailies. I haven't done the Akriloth challenge in a long time since I already have everything there, but I know that for other dailies, there's always someone else doing the same quest at midnight.

 

Or you could do them during a peak time as well. It depends on your server choice as well. It's not a strange thing to witness players not in certain areas even if you are in a server that is close to max user count.

 

The peak time for daily quests is midnight. That's when there's a flood of players doing dailies. There aren't as many players doing dailies any other time of the day, even when the user count on a server is full, and that's sort of the problem. During other times of the day, people are more spread out around the game. Some players are in Yulgar's Inn, others are in Battleon, some are doing the latest release, and some are doing other things. If anything, AE needs to increase the server limit instead of capping it, because 1,000 or so players online isn't enough to bring activity to the game.

And if max user count is useful for determining anything, it would be for non-daily things, specifically for new releases.

 

Seems like a strange thing to do. It's like waiting for a store to open even though you could go to a store later at a more reasonable time. I know that people have more time on their hands currently, but that's a bit excessive if you ask me. There's only one server that actually even gets close to capping is Red Dragon and if we can't reach two servers capping then it does make much sense to increase that limit and it's better to have a lower limit for the sake of server stability.

 

Ok, I think this one's stranger.. and creepy.

Spoiler: screenshot

 

I disagree with needing a lower limit, and I think needing a low limit is just a misconception about servers. There are usually ways of circumventing issues involving too many users on one server, such as partitioning the server via shards... like maybe you have a master server which communicates to smaller servers to aid with latency and other issues, so you would pretty much have one conglomerate server.

There are a lot of other factors that play into server stability, such as region, and it's oftentimes why you see region-based servers, but psychologically speaking, players generally don't like being segregated from other players.

But I do think it's still useful to have a couple of servers around, just in case one goes down, but I don't think we need four servers where there's a small player cap, because that takes away the whole meaning of a "massively multiplayer" online role-playing game. What's the fun in exploring a small server where I constantly roam around in barren maps anyway?

 

AQ3D doesn't really have that high active player numbers so having a lower limit isn't really a problem. AE would have left it the way it was, but they didn't so there was a problem, more like a temporary problem to be frank. AQ3D right now is more like an "opposite multiplayer" online role-playing game and those lower limits make it feel that way. Will AE revert those changes? Only thing we can do is wait and see if that happens. Is it really that strange to have a game in the state that it is in have lower limits like that?

 

I think the game suffers largely because of its low player count, but also its linearity. The game has TONS of areas, but most of the time, you visit that area maybe only once or twice, and so for a lot of new players, they struggle through progression because they're usually exploring a barren map. The game pretty much encourages players to keep up with just new releases, and there's usually no incentive for re-exploring an old release.

Personally, I think AQ3D would have been better off as a single-player game because of those sort of issues, but I don't think AE would have known that since they can't predict how many players would have ended up playing AQ3D anyway. Even before AE added more servers, the game's had issues with maintaining engagement in maps.

And I think the unfortunate part of AE's strategy for trying to make AQ3D seem like a success is by comparing themselves with big companies like Blizzard... by touting things like how AQ3D is different by being free to play, cross-platform, and other loaded words. The truth is that you can't really compare apples to oranges; yet, AQ3D is really no different than many other 3D MMORPGs, maybe only a few steps behind. I think a large part of what makes successful MMORPGs great, such as World of Warcraft, is the engagement itself, rather than just a few gimmicks to entice players to try out a game.

 

It would be just strange to switch from a MMORPG to a RPG, but AE can't really do that because they are very deep in this idea of making a 3D cross-platform MMORPG game.

 

It wouldn't be too crazy to switch from one genre to another similar one, considering the game is still in Beta. The biggest change would be rescaling monsters in the game. If anything, a single player RPG would feel closer to the original AQ.

But of course, the idea won't sit well for a lot of current players. A lot of current players have already chosen to play the game for the social aspect, and the social aspect of the game is part of what encourages players to spend money... like being able to purchase in-game items just to show off to friends.

But another consideration is having a quasi-single-player experience. For instance, the main hubs (Yulgar's Inn, Battleon, the inside of Arcangrove Tower, Boog's Tavern, etc.) will still have the social aspect where you can interact with other players, and you'll still be able to get whispers (and perhaps global chat messages at some later point) from players, no matter where you are or what you're doing. But the single player experience will just be limited to story quests or something... places that have monsters that you need to defeat. And maybe there will be certain exceptions, where you can invite friends or something. This idea won't entirely remove the multiplayer aspect of the game, because the multiplayer aspect could still be focused on other things like PvP and maybe even holiday events. The whole premise of this entire idea is fixing the experience by making the game flow better.

 

It sure would, but AE didn't intent to make AQ3D a single player RPG. The commitment they have put to it being a MMORPG says that this isn't going to happen and it would just go against AE's promises. It would be their strangest decision to the date when AQ3D is concerned, just straight up switching the genre of their game they have been working on for many years.

 

During the Breaking Benjamin battle concert whenever the concert was over and you got kicked out to Battleon, if you could time it right, jumping off the cliff and falling at the same time as being kicked would land you just outside the town square. There is a moat that runs all the way around it and you could explore that.
Another strange incident is when Akriloth became untethered and would move to attack you. His head was having some major clipping issues.
A friend of mine also had a glitch where she could battle in her travel form.

 

Not surprising people continue to discover more weird things in the game. I think the "battling in a form" issue is well-known; it's something I've encounter plenty of times a few years ago in Dreadfool's Labyrinth.

 

the character's clothes keep changing by themselves when I'm playing on my cell phone