As I said in the title, I have a lot of suggestions. They range from new features to tiny nitpicks, and instead of try to make 17 separate threads for each, I am putting them all together. These are all the things I noticed in the month or so I have spent playing on Potterworld. A few of these might really be better as bug reports, but I didn't want to make separate threads for those in a different spot. If I should split these up or move the ones that are more like bugs somewhere else, let me know. I think at least one of these has been rejected for being outside of current technical capabilities, and I just want to mention that it is my ambition to join the dev team once I hit level 80 (I'm 64 right now) and so I would be willing and excited to implement any of these if I were to be accepted.
===UI===
The health of mobs, exp to level up, and potion timers, all things that count down, can show 0. This is probably either due to rounding a decimal number number downwards or a check that checks for less than 0 instead of less than or equal to 0. I suspect for at least the potion timers it is the former, as they appear to last the correct amount of time, but a 3 second timer counts 2, 1, 0 instead of the more intuitive 3, 2, 1. The general rule of thumb I use is that you should round away from the direction you are counting, but the current system appears to just always round down. I suggest that this be changed so that mobs cannot display 0 health without dying and the timers count down in a more intuitive manner.
Selling things to vendors takes a very long time, mostly because you have to keep clicking the category it is in. The market quick buy and stock deposit menus prove that it is possible to make a menu based on the contents of the player's inventory, so I suggest that that sort of menu be used instead of the current one.
In chat, when you leave the global channel, you get the message "You have focused Global" before the message "The channel you left was your focused channel, reverting to Local." I know this is a really small nitpick but the messages would make much more sense in the other order, so if it's not too hard it would be nice for them to be switched. Also, when you focus a channel and that also makes you join it, it would be nice a message that you have joined the channel and then that you focused it so that you know for sure that you hadn't been in that channel before.
Currently, both /me and the minecraft exp bar display your total exp, out of the total exp you need for your next level. Especially at higher levels, this means that for a long time the exp bar just displays as full because your total exp is so high compared to the exp for your next level. I think it would be much more useful if /me and the exp bar showed just your exp to the next level, instead of total. For example, if you were level 52, the % full for the exp bar would be calculated as follows: (current exp - lvl 52 exp) / (lvl 53 exp - lvl 52 exp) * 100
The information displayed above the health bar is great for not having to open f3 as much and helps with immersion, except for the fact that it doesn't show you which direction you're facing. Many quests tell you to go a specific cardinal direction, so if a compass was added there, it would make f3 less necessary and be a useful tool to help with quests.
===Gameplay===
I think that respeccing your skill tree is currently too expensive. I like the idea of the skill tree, and want to experiment with it to find what my favorite spells are, but it is hard to do that when I have to spend an amount of AC that could get me an entire level. At higher levels, and once I get better at classes, 50 AC becomes somewhat less of an investment, but I didn't spend any spell points for many levels when I was starting out because I was afraid of regretting my decision and having to spend at least a level's worth of AC to reset it. I suggest that the cost to respec be reduced, maybe to somewhere around 10 or 20 ACs, so that it still costs something but it is easier to experiment.
EDIT: Thanks to Joshios for letting me know this is a duplicate of an approved suggestion!
Mobs drop their unique loot quite infrequently, and this leads to confusion for some over if they are doing the right thing, and frustration for many as it takes a very long time to grind, for example, 6 Thestry Hearts and 6 Boomslang Venom when you lack mobility spells or a broom to keep away and must constantly retreat while being unable to deal very much damage. The early quests that involved killing mobs were very frustrating for me, and for several of them I just bought the mob drops so that I would not have to slog through so many hours and deaths of farming. It makes sense, on some level, to make players grind for strong but optional items such as the strongest gear or faster brooms, but to do it for the quests is just frustrating. I suggest that the early quests require less materials or that the combat at early levels be rebalanced to make it less frustrating and slow to fight them.
EDIT: To clarify, my final point here is that I believe that some of the early quests with mob drop requirements should have the quantity required reduced, not removed. For example, the quest that needs 6 Thestry Hearts and 6 Boomslang Venom could only require 3 of each. This keeps them as introductions to fighting mobs without making them too long of a grind. For lower level players, quests are a big source of exp, so making them long grinds will turn away players.
It would be nice to have some way to figure out things about someone who you only have the username of, similar what you see if you shift-click someone or the !player command on the discord. I like seeing what houses people are in and what level they are, but when they have a different prefix than their house you can't tell. The description of the !player command mentions a /whois command, but trying /whois gives a permission denied message.
EDIT: Some of the discussion in this thread has made me realize that perhaps an in-game menu is not the best solution to this problem, or at least not as the only solution. I still think that an in-game menu would be nice, but perhaps the discord bot needs some work. My main frustration with the bot is that it doesn't allow searching by many of the categories that I care about, such as what types of spells it boosts. A more sophisticated searching or filtering system would be nice, though maybe difficult to build into a discord bot.
It would also be nice to have some way to see what gear a recipe results gives, without having to switch over to discord. Importantly I would want this to be available without having actually have the recipe, so that you can see what you're getting before buying recipes from player shops. One possible system could be a menu with a similar structure to the tailor's crafting menu, only it shows you every possible gear of a given year and type instead of only the ones you have recipes for in your inventory.
Currently you cannot access your housing while at the Luna Hovel, even though you can at the nearby Dwelling. I think the Luna Hovel should have access to housing because there are several fetch quests there and having to walk all the way to the Dwelling to access your storage chests is a pain.
EDIT: To clarify, the reason I felt this is because I already had many of the items I needed for these quests from chests and fighting mobs, and I was storing them in my housing. This turned the quests that should have been easy because of my preparedness into a series of slogs back and forth between the nearest housing access point and the Hovel to retrieve the appropriate items from my storage.
If you get put into a minigame part way through brewing or doing a brewing-equivalent quest task, you lose any items you already put into task. If some of them are quest items, it locks you out of the quest until an admin can give you the quest items. This is probably more a bug than a suggestion but I don't want to make a separate thread just for this.
EDIT: This came up the discussion but I'm also putting it up here so it doesn't get missed. The new Scarlet NPC is a nice idea for helping with first-year quests, but using it means that you don't really get to learn the castle or experience the exploration. What Pankakes suggested and I agree with is system of smaller checkpoints starting from the Great Hall and leading you to your class, instead of just getting coordinates that don't help very much or being teleported right to it.
===Quests===
In the 3rd Year quest Promoting S.P.E.W., one of the flyer locations is listed as "near Quality Cakes and Confection." The actual location, which I ended up needing someone else to give me the coordinates to, was in fact not really close to QCC. Instead, it was in fact right in front of the Lumen Theatre. While Lumen Theatre may be harder to find than QCC, listing the location as being near there is just misleading.
EDIT: Thanks to chaileyrose for letting me know this one is fixed!
Many of the puzzles in Potterworld's quests are interesting and thought provoking. A few however, seem to be a little two obtuse. The second year House of the Cunning quest is a perfect example of this. People in chat are always asking how to solve it, and the most common answer is to just tell people to click ETAO, which is not even what the answer really is. The problem with that puzzle is that there are many layers, first unscrambling how the runes correspond to the statues, then clicking them in the right order. There is also a guessing component, you have to figure out to spell out OPEN. Then there is the part that is somewhat misleading, if the letters and statues didn't line up so well people would be more likely to see that the statues are not directly associated with the letters, but that each is associated with a rune. I think this puzzle would be much improved if the runes and statues didn't have a seemingly obvious direct correlation so that it was more obvious to use the runes, and that you were given a better hint as to what you needed to spell.
===Classes===
I think this might already be implemented in some stadiums, but the server does have systems for not being able to cast spells in certain areas, and teachers are always telling students not to cast in the stands. It seems like it would make sense to mark the stands as a no-casting area so that people can't cast in the stands. This would just make one less rule that the teachers have to say every time and lower the number of warning teachers need to give out during class.
Almost every class has some sort of timed element, whether that is to complete the parkour in Wizard PE or to write an assignment in a notes or creative writing class. This causes a lot of time checks, which take time away from both the teacher/helpers and the student. Instead, I suggest a timer system in which a teacher can start a timer during class for a specific amount of time, and then students can check the remaining time with a command (maybe /timeleft or /timecheck) and a message is sent in chat when the time ends. This would allow teachers to automate somewhat tedious task of having to give out time checks and also could give a more accurate time that includes seconds. I've seen a system similar to this in some Wizard PE classes but I think it should be on a command instead of click so that it can also be used in writing classes.
===Misc===
It would be really cool if the house cup indicators in the Great Hall actually indicated the relative house points of the houses, or maybe how many points they had on a scale based on the typical number of house points at the end of each house cup.
The library maze has some really dark spots where it's easy to get turned around. I suggest either lighting the maze a little better or allowing Lumen in it.
===UI===
The health of mobs, exp to level up, and potion timers, all things that count down, can show 0. This is probably either due to rounding a decimal number number downwards or a check that checks for less than 0 instead of less than or equal to 0. I suspect for at least the potion timers it is the former, as they appear to last the correct amount of time, but a 3 second timer counts 2, 1, 0 instead of the more intuitive 3, 2, 1. The general rule of thumb I use is that you should round away from the direction you are counting, but the current system appears to just always round down. I suggest that this be changed so that mobs cannot display 0 health without dying and the timers count down in a more intuitive manner.
Selling things to vendors takes a very long time, mostly because you have to keep clicking the category it is in. The market quick buy and stock deposit menus prove that it is possible to make a menu based on the contents of the player's inventory, so I suggest that that sort of menu be used instead of the current one.
In chat, when you leave the global channel, you get the message "You have focused Global" before the message "The channel you left was your focused channel, reverting to Local." I know this is a really small nitpick but the messages would make much more sense in the other order, so if it's not too hard it would be nice for them to be switched. Also, when you focus a channel and that also makes you join it, it would be nice a message that you have joined the channel and then that you focused it so that you know for sure that you hadn't been in that channel before.
Currently, both /me and the minecraft exp bar display your total exp, out of the total exp you need for your next level. Especially at higher levels, this means that for a long time the exp bar just displays as full because your total exp is so high compared to the exp for your next level. I think it would be much more useful if /me and the exp bar showed just your exp to the next level, instead of total. For example, if you were level 52, the % full for the exp bar would be calculated as follows: (current exp - lvl 52 exp) / (lvl 53 exp - lvl 52 exp) * 100
The information displayed above the health bar is great for not having to open f3 as much and helps with immersion, except for the fact that it doesn't show you which direction you're facing. Many quests tell you to go a specific cardinal direction, so if a compass was added there, it would make f3 less necessary and be a useful tool to help with quests.
===Gameplay===
I think that respeccing your skill tree is currently too expensive. I like the idea of the skill tree, and want to experiment with it to find what my favorite spells are, but it is hard to do that when I have to spend an amount of AC that could get me an entire level. At higher levels, and once I get better at classes, 50 AC becomes somewhat less of an investment, but I didn't spend any spell points for many levels when I was starting out because I was afraid of regretting my decision and having to spend at least a level's worth of AC to reset it. I suggest that the cost to respec be reduced, maybe to somewhere around 10 or 20 ACs, so that it still costs something but it is easier to experiment.
EDIT: Thanks to Joshios for letting me know this is a duplicate of an approved suggestion!
Mobs drop their unique loot quite infrequently, and this leads to confusion for some over if they are doing the right thing, and frustration for many as it takes a very long time to grind, for example, 6 Thestry Hearts and 6 Boomslang Venom when you lack mobility spells or a broom to keep away and must constantly retreat while being unable to deal very much damage. The early quests that involved killing mobs were very frustrating for me, and for several of them I just bought the mob drops so that I would not have to slog through so many hours and deaths of farming. It makes sense, on some level, to make players grind for strong but optional items such as the strongest gear or faster brooms, but to do it for the quests is just frustrating. I suggest that the early quests require less materials or that the combat at early levels be rebalanced to make it less frustrating and slow to fight them.
EDIT: To clarify, my final point here is that I believe that some of the early quests with mob drop requirements should have the quantity required reduced, not removed. For example, the quest that needs 6 Thestry Hearts and 6 Boomslang Venom could only require 3 of each. This keeps them as introductions to fighting mobs without making them too long of a grind. For lower level players, quests are a big source of exp, so making them long grinds will turn away players.
It would be nice to have some way to figure out things about someone who you only have the username of, similar what you see if you shift-click someone or the !player command on the discord. I like seeing what houses people are in and what level they are, but when they have a different prefix than their house you can't tell. The description of the !player command mentions a /whois command, but trying /whois gives a permission denied message.
EDIT: Some of the discussion in this thread has made me realize that perhaps an in-game menu is not the best solution to this problem, or at least not as the only solution. I still think that an in-game menu would be nice, but perhaps the discord bot needs some work. My main frustration with the bot is that it doesn't allow searching by many of the categories that I care about, such as what types of spells it boosts. A more sophisticated searching or filtering system would be nice, though maybe difficult to build into a discord bot.
It would also be nice to have some way to see what gear a recipe results gives, without having to switch over to discord. Importantly I would want this to be available without having actually have the recipe, so that you can see what you're getting before buying recipes from player shops. One possible system could be a menu with a similar structure to the tailor's crafting menu, only it shows you every possible gear of a given year and type instead of only the ones you have recipes for in your inventory.
Currently you cannot access your housing while at the Luna Hovel, even though you can at the nearby Dwelling. I think the Luna Hovel should have access to housing because there are several fetch quests there and having to walk all the way to the Dwelling to access your storage chests is a pain.
EDIT: To clarify, the reason I felt this is because I already had many of the items I needed for these quests from chests and fighting mobs, and I was storing them in my housing. This turned the quests that should have been easy because of my preparedness into a series of slogs back and forth between the nearest housing access point and the Hovel to retrieve the appropriate items from my storage.
If you get put into a minigame part way through brewing or doing a brewing-equivalent quest task, you lose any items you already put into task. If some of them are quest items, it locks you out of the quest until an admin can give you the quest items. This is probably more a bug than a suggestion but I don't want to make a separate thread just for this.
EDIT: This came up the discussion but I'm also putting it up here so it doesn't get missed. The new Scarlet NPC is a nice idea for helping with first-year quests, but using it means that you don't really get to learn the castle or experience the exploration. What Pankakes suggested and I agree with is system of smaller checkpoints starting from the Great Hall and leading you to your class, instead of just getting coordinates that don't help very much or being teleported right to it.
===Quests===
In the 3rd Year quest Promoting S.P.E.W., one of the flyer locations is listed as "near Quality Cakes and Confection." The actual location, which I ended up needing someone else to give me the coordinates to, was in fact not really close to QCC. Instead, it was in fact right in front of the Lumen Theatre. While Lumen Theatre may be harder to find than QCC, listing the location as being near there is just misleading.
EDIT: Thanks to chaileyrose for letting me know this one is fixed!
Many of the puzzles in Potterworld's quests are interesting and thought provoking. A few however, seem to be a little two obtuse. The second year House of the Cunning quest is a perfect example of this. People in chat are always asking how to solve it, and the most common answer is to just tell people to click ETAO, which is not even what the answer really is. The problem with that puzzle is that there are many layers, first unscrambling how the runes correspond to the statues, then clicking them in the right order. There is also a guessing component, you have to figure out to spell out OPEN. Then there is the part that is somewhat misleading, if the letters and statues didn't line up so well people would be more likely to see that the statues are not directly associated with the letters, but that each is associated with a rune. I think this puzzle would be much improved if the runes and statues didn't have a seemingly obvious direct correlation so that it was more obvious to use the runes, and that you were given a better hint as to what you needed to spell.
===Classes===
I think this might already be implemented in some stadiums, but the server does have systems for not being able to cast spells in certain areas, and teachers are always telling students not to cast in the stands. It seems like it would make sense to mark the stands as a no-casting area so that people can't cast in the stands. This would just make one less rule that the teachers have to say every time and lower the number of warning teachers need to give out during class.
Almost every class has some sort of timed element, whether that is to complete the parkour in Wizard PE or to write an assignment in a notes or creative writing class. This causes a lot of time checks, which take time away from both the teacher/helpers and the student. Instead, I suggest a timer system in which a teacher can start a timer during class for a specific amount of time, and then students can check the remaining time with a command (maybe /timeleft or /timecheck) and a message is sent in chat when the time ends. This would allow teachers to automate somewhat tedious task of having to give out time checks and also could give a more accurate time that includes seconds. I've seen a system similar to this in some Wizard PE classes but I think it should be on a command instead of click so that it can also be used in writing classes.
===Misc===
It would be really cool if the house cup indicators in the Great Hall actually indicated the relative house points of the houses, or maybe how many points they had on a scale based on the typical number of house points at the end of each house cup.
The library maze has some really dark spots where it's easy to get turned around. I suggest either lighting the maze a little better or allowing Lumen in it.
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