Ol' West First Impressions
 

I downloaded ol west about 24hrs ago. Here are my first thoughts.

After coming from Classic, the game is definitely not as polished and the controls feel like hot garbage. I hate the graal era and zone controls, and they definitely don't work in ol west since you can only shoot horizontal and vertical. The diagonals either shoot up or down and make combat stupid. I wish it were like classic because the right side controls are redundant. The character stops every time you fire, and I tend to focus my direction toward the opponent right before I'm ready to fire anyway. I end up shooting in the wrong direction regardless with this bad right side action wheel, especially with how useless the diagonals are if you're only limited to horizontal and vertical firing firections. Would be fine on mounts but I'd prefer something closer to classic where I can just push one button to fire instead of worrying about the direction. If I can already focus the direction with my left hand, I shouldn't have to with my right hand. I wish that was an option.

Bullet and arrow hit registers are attrocious. Literally shot at a guy on a mount dancing around trying to dodge his bullets while shooting at him. Arrows don't register, and bullets don't seem to register if they're running around on mounts.
If you run WITH the direction of the bullet or arrow, it doesn't register and you don't take damage. Makes no sense.

Melee weapons are inconsistent.

Guns are pay to win. Not good.

I see plenty of options for earning gralats. There's fishing, selling furs, farming gralats, farming crops, mining, and jobs.The only one that sucks is bug hunting. I seem to only be able to carry one bug at a time, and that's disappointing. No wonder nobody tries to catch any since you can only carry one at a time, and I only found 1 place to sell bugs. Nobody, including myself, will want to travel all over the place to catch one bug, then go back to the only place to sell them. Waste of time.

One thing I found good about gralat farming was how gralats can spawn from $1 to $4 if they're green. This is something I wish classic would do, because green is anywhere from 1 to 4, blue is 5 to 30, and so on.

Lots of buildings we can't enter. Weird.

Probably not gonna play any more, though. Playerbase of like 365 and nothing to really do. Combat sucks, no real purpose for me really. Doesn't seem fun.

What do you mean by you can only carry one bug at a time though? You would need to buy multiple jars to carry more than one bug

It wouldn't let me buy anymore, so I thought one was the limit.

In my opinion ol west got some great additions that I love and makes me wanna play it more and more.A lot of jobs and a lot of activities to do..It s hard to get bored there :D

Played Ol' West in 2015. Can't really describe my first impression since all I did was roam around (it was that time when I didn't know all about identification so I lost my account) so I'll just count my impression after gaining experience on other GraalOnline servers back on 2018.

Era was the main server I play when I got a sudden interest in coming back to Ol' West after watching a video on yt titled 'How to earn 1k to 50k gralats a day'. Woodcutting caught my fancy cause it looked kind of fun and relaxing, which made me choose the job to earn gralats.

I wasn't the pker type, I was the type to fill my inventory/buy lots of hats that fits my custom uploads. Which led me to get into working immediately. As I said, woodcutting was the job I chose but I changed my mind cause I figured out it doesn't earn me much compared to fishing-- which is actually the FASTEST job up until now.

Leveling up was kinda fast? I think you can get up to level 30+ in a day. The gaps between the levels regarding the variations of sellable you can get wasn't bad at all. I think it took me a week to reach level 60 on fishing (which is the level required for the last fish you can get which costs 50$).

Bug catching, I didn't think it was that bad cause from what I remember the bug spawn rate is decent and bug jars cost 20$ while bugs won't lower than 40$. I used it as a side job when bugs spawn around me when I woodcut.

Guns aren't really pay to win as long as you have a decent level on any job even for just a week you can get 100k or perhaps even 200k while the most expensive gun back then cost 100k.

Farming crops! This one led me to the riches. I loved their farming system SO MUCH! I thought it was some kind of bonus job cause it's extremely easy to manage.

I thought I'd be some kind of solo player, I wouldn't interact with anyone since I was so into grinding and spending (i thought it'd be troublesome but it didn't matter cause of the low playerbase). Somehow I earned some friends along the way, they were my 'work' buddies!

Can't think of anything else. I'm sure I had fun! I wouldn't go tap tap tap for so long to reach my levels if i didn't!

Wow

Alot of misinformation present in the original post, not saying West is without issues but alot of OP’s gripes are misconceptions, ill provide a few examples:

Regarding your issues with the controls, are you sure you just haven’t gotten used to them yet? Having both sticks is necessary, being able to move one way and fire another way is fairly important. “Stopping” everytime you shoot is part of a stat called “freeze” this is here to allow the opponent to punish someone for spamming their weapons or shooting at poor times. If freeze wasn’t present the game would feel very floaty and guns would have no ‘weight’. The starting weapons are pretty bad but obtaining money on west is faster than any other mobile server and it doesn’t take too long to get a basic gralat weapon.

Regarding the game being pay to win. Its really not, unless you want to include auctions but even then they are optional. None of the guns in the gun shops are top tier. Every single “top tier” weapon is obtained with a currency or stat that cannot be purchased with real money. Its more “play a whole lot” to win, more or less

Going back to your point on hit detection. Theres nothing wrong here, from what i can tell, you dont seem to have a grasp on what ping is and how it would affect gameplay. Just because you saw someone get hit, doesnt mean they saw themself get hit. If they lived somewhere far from the server’s physical location, you’d have a fair amount of ping. Plenty of people will complain about lag, but as long as someone’s connection is stable, you can learn to predict them (this also applies to classic, which i played for several years before moving to west like the gold prospector i am) its all part of the gameplay, obviously no lag would be ideal but it is what it is.

Farming via bushes in west is an afterthought and should never be your way of making money, “fur selling” isnt a thing anymore so i wouldnt try seeking it out. Mining, woodcutting and fishing are your go-to’s, pick a job, level it up, earn more as you level, its a runescapey approach but it works for the most part.

Catching a bug will cost you one Bug-jar, these can be bought from the same place you sell bugs. Most people buy them on bulk and just pick up bugs when theyre going from one place to another, its not a primary income maker if you catch my drift

I understand there can be alot of misconceptions when starting out and im not hounding you for voicing them, the optional tutorial the game gives is very outdated and theres not alot to go off when starting out. Just wanted to clear up some misinformation :)

@J*

There are a lot of options for making money, but only a few are actually worth the time, yeah.

Hit detection is pretty bad in my opinion. I thought it was bad in Zone and Era, too, but nothing really seems to work. I use charter internet right now (Charter friggin sucks) but even when it's working really well nothing seems to work unless they're standing still. Or if they're outside the U.S.

When I talk about the controls, I'm only really griping about the right directional pad. I never liked it in Zone and Era, and it's actually even worse in ol west. You can't even fire diagonally, yet there are arrows on the directional pad that point diagonally.
The freezing is whatever, just a mechanic.
Instead of the right action wheel I would like to see an action button. Like I said, I can already make my character face my opponent with the left dpad. Just wish it were an option since the right wheel just feels bad.

So, to clear out all misconceptions, there are only three ways to make money, hit detection sucks, and the controls also suck. Gotcha.

dual-stick controls complaints are just your preference and I've never heard anyone but you complain about it
there isn't only 3 jobs it's just that 3 out of the 4 level jobs are actually good. on top of them there's still farming, bug catching. there's panning/plant cutting (if you want to your waste time I guess) and I guess trading probably counts as a job.
I've never had a large complaint with hit detection. Sure sometimes it's a bit iffy during lag but other than that I haven't had any problems with it.