New player's thoughts on multiplayer

Hello! I wasn't sure if this type of post was allowed but I figured feedback should be posted somewhere to be seen.

Me and my friends (group of 3 for context) have been loving the game so far. We are excited exploring the beautifully crafted and detailed world and the souls like combat. We are excited to play the game with a new set of eyes in October as well.

There are a couple of things that have really been making the multiplayer experience a bit of a slog which feel like carry-overs from the single player experience.

The town experience "wait your turn"

- only one person per vendor means it takes forever to do anything, especially with most functions being around Eleonora.

- one person per storage. Same issue, it takes forever having to wait your turn to do anything

- no junk feature makes both of the above even worse. I cannot mark things as junk and sell or transfer them between inventories.

- the town is beautiful but I wish there were more whispers to travel through it more efficiently. I see that it is going for immersion but man it takes a while to get anywhere

The combat experience

- I think that in terms of fairness and immersion friendly fire makes sense (enemies have it too) but in a game as punishing as this it's kind of an additional layer of difficulty that isn't necessarily more fun or rewarding

- you're already cc'd by hitting each other and it is very easy to cancel each other's abilities. Is it really necessary that we also hurt each other? I think most games will choose one or the other but both feels very awkward to play around

- this makes it very awkward for two melee players to be around each other when enemies are swarming or if there is a single boss. We are constantly trying to not hit each other, which can sometimes be a meaningful experience but it's just way too easy to get in each other's way

- this leads to us focusing on more ranged weapons so we can try to avoid hitting each other, but there are still a lot of big aoe abilities and cool spells that just make the entire battlefield chaotic to look at and hard to tell what is going on

-this also means that I'm order to not constantly knock each other down, we have to avoid using a lot of the cool stuff so we aren't just killing each other. Which kind of takes away from the joy of the game

I think if the game was supposed to be hard core survival this would be a little more warranted, but I think the way the system is currently doesn't exactly make it fun to try out all the weapons and skills and make your favorite build. Maybe the intention is for you to have different build for solo and single player? Right now the multiplayer experience feels very in the way of actually playing the game. I hope I'm not the only one that feels this way as we are really enjoying the game otherwise.