We'll probably need to release the system and then monitor as it goes. With xp loss off and pk xp gain increasing and being open to the entire ring, we're going to see a marked increase in pvp participation. This is a good thing. However, the system is currently balanced around numbers based on the current, reduced, xp generation. If we see a 10 fold increase in pk, you could easily justify ratcheting down the pvp xp gain by reducing its output. A lot of this is going to have to be figured out while we're killing the crap out of one another.
If we see a 10 fold increase in pk, you could easily justify ratcheting down the pvp xp gain by reducing its output.
If you see a 10 fold increase in PvP, you know you did something right.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Health reserves are fairly potent, and I don't mind it being an achievement to get to a high PK level. PK levels are sort of an achievement, and I'd hate to diminish them by making PK aspect easy or commonplace.
Why not just permashrub those people when you see the hundred deaths on the death log? It seems like you are trying to use mechanics to enforce policy, when really the two should remain separate.
Additionally, how would removing the pk xp stop people from doing this at the spring for achievement bonuses -- somehow we got that to stop, and it wasn't by adding in a hard coded rule
Yeah. People still have no qualms farming achievements, even if it's announced very loudly to the world that they are doing it. It's just that everyone that wants to farm one of those achievements has already done so. Also, it's kind of hard to tell the difference between two people boosting off each other, and two people that just like fighting and prefer duels to spars.
There's no rule against paying someone to kill them, and I don't see why they'd add one - taking away the experience loss would just make the price go down.
As the Imperian Achievement *****, I have to say that Questing and PlayerKilling to Aspect should still be the two hardest achievements in the entire game (Aside from 1,000 red shards maybe?).
Questing is going to be getting scaled up with the new quest system being implemented, which is awesome, but you can see that are many quests that can be farmed in order to get the Quest Experience for the particular achievement. I think Amaris is the only person who secondhand received the achievement by Rafe/Balan turn ins that Markie did.
The player killing gain is horrendous currently in experience, and you usually lose it in any monolith/obelisk/outpost/shardfall fight. I think I have hovered around where I am for about six months at this point. Give or take 5%.
Justus is the only person I know to actually pay someone (Kari I think?) to get PK Aspect (He might have been just getting normal Aspect as well, can't remember).
I think the PK EXP and Quest EXP should remain to the current set they are at.
Aspecthood doesn't matter here, it barely did when first created, and it certainly didn't after achievements were unleashed upon us, and 'gaming' them wasn't merely accepted, but encouraged. Why now pretend that XP matters at all?
If you're a true-novice, and we allow/encourage pvp experience, then hey, you get to explore the lowbie areas, use them for gold, but also see a real reward from going out and pvp'ing with your comrades. If your not a true-novice then you get to go out and 'game the system', and get to the level that you know you need to be at if you want to compete at all. Is that genuinely so bad?
With no experience loss, I would take part in more obelisk and shardfall battles. However, I believe I would be one of the limp-wristed combatants mentioned above. You never know though, it might be the motivation I need to be a little more useful.
I am not a useful combatant. All I am is a meatshield and an **** who screams over clantells to gather.
But I still go.
The problem with lowering the barrier to entry is that the unmotivated are still unmotivated.
If you aren't listening to the calls for action now, you aren't going to listen to strangers barking orders at you in the middle of a fight.
But this is an old argument. Mostly, I don't like that we're upsetting age old basics of the game while we still haven't assimilated the previous 10 upsets. The help files are increasingly dated, the reliable newbie resources are horribly overpriced, and the idea of an overarching narrative has been largely shattered.
Why don't we just make playing the game simpler? I've gone through the new newbie process, and the greatest complaint I can level against it is it does not even suggest a final goal. It's like mental crack, moving you from one step to the other, and once you leave that shelter of the tutorial, the world is a dark and scary place. A single voice telling them, "Become an Aspect." would be a welcome addition.
Why don't we just make playing the game simpler? I've gone through the new newbie process, and the greatest complaint I can level against it is it does not even suggest a final goal. It's like mental crack, moving you from one step to the other, and once you leave that shelter of the tutorial, the world is a dark and scary place. A single voice telling them, "Become an Aspect." would be a welcome addition.
That is indeed what we are focusing on - it's a long process, though, and it is important to do things in a way such that we do not needlessly sacrifice the game's depth in the process.
"Make the game simpler" is a very hard thing to do, because the game requires a certain level of the depth and complexity to be interesting.
Myself, I remain convinced that a lot of the problem is that real newbies come at these classes blindly. They have no way of knowing that they'll be combat effective in teams at Fabled-ish in Chivalry as a Runeguard, but they'll need dual-trans to work it as a Hunter. They don't know that Druid and Cleric are fairly simple offensively and can run on about a skill and a half, while Renegade's going to require 3 trans skills and a lot of learning to accomplish anything.
And so the newbies who come into Druid and Warden and Knight and Cleric have a pretty easy and awesome time and can get involved in fighting on just their leveling credits.
And the newbies who start as Renegade, Assassin, Malignist, Hunter, Bard, NewMage, Summoner, or other such classes go "It's going to cost me HOW much to get my basic combat set? And I'm going to be garbage until I do?"
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Why don't we just make playing the game simpler? I've gone through the new newbie process, and the greatest complaint I can level against it is it does not even suggest a final goal. It's like mental crack, moving you from one step to the other, and once you leave that shelter of the tutorial, the world is a dark and scary place. A single voice telling them, "Become an Aspect." would be a welcome addition.
What definition of simpler are you using? Between path finding and autocuring, the game is SIMPLER than ever. What is complicated about it? Classes? That is a different issue, not all classes are equal (nor should be)
I would like to understand what do you think is complicated right now. The game, by design, is open-ended. You could try to become relevant in politics, be just a fanatical explorer, a tireless basher or a bloodthirsty PKer.
People looking to play a mud aren't looking for "simple" guys. Chances are newbies that are logging in are mostly other mud players (Sometimes previous IRE players and sometimes you get players from muds who JUST discovered TMS (like me, 8 years ago with Aetolia)).
I think Imperian is probably the MOST newbie friendly of the IREs because of Autocuring. Someone who can create simple aliases can still be relatively useful in team PK.
@Dyrren I do agree with your points about the lack of narrative, and also the outdated help files though.
When you find an outdated help file, use the BUG command to report it and let us know what's outdated about it.
Amongst the other half a million things she works hard on, @Svorai (along with the other members of our amazing team) always keeps an eye on the bugs and has been editing helpfiles left and right to make them better.
It's an ongoing process, and we'd love your help in figuring out what could use improvement in the help files.
That is indeed what we are focusing on - it's a long process, though, and it is important to do things in a way such that we do not needlessly sacrifice the game's depth in the process.
I'm certainly willing to wait.
As for what everyone else said :
The narrative could be something as simple as, "Become an Aspect and resist all those bad things out in the wide world." It requires no great eloquence or complexity. Hell, you don't even need a reason to drop some army of NPCs on a player after that, as they grow to expect it after all that bashing.
And autocuring did not make things simpler conceptually. It obfuscated and didn't address the faults in curing, which were that it was impossible to read incoming messages fast enough and/or the cures were not very effective.
Now combat scrolls on by with what amounts to spam that the player still has little to no understanding of. I don't know how to improve it, My ideas are terrible, but it is going to be an increasing burden as the game continues to progress.
To be clear, what I'm referring to is the increasingly large amount of useless information players are exposed to.
And autocuring did not make things simpler conceptually. It obfuscated and didn't address the faults in curing, which were that it was impossible to read incoming messages fast enough and/or the cures were not very effective.
I feel like it's about the same amount of information, tbh. It's just a matter of using gags, whatever. My advice? Just calm down, wait, see what happens. The team that's working on the game now is moving at a great pace and we're getting updates all the time.
I know most of what you said is on their to do list.
‘Least I won’t have to carry it no more. You see how bloody heavy it is?’
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
Combat spam is something that we talk about a lot. We actually slowed mob attacks down from 4 seconds each to about 12 seconds (maybe more actually) in newbie areas, so they they have a chance to read things. PvP combat is a whole other beast.
I liken it to that scene in The Matrix where Cypher tells Neo that he doesn't even see the code anymore, just a blond, a brunette or whatever. Once you've fought enough you begin to see through the spam and just know what's what.
Comments
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
(There's an agree button, you don't need to post "I agree!" or "^")
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
When you die, regardless of circumstance, you should lose the same amount of pk xp.
I am not a useful combatant. All I am is a meatshield and an **** who screams over clantells to gather.
But I still go.
The problem with lowering the barrier to entry is that the unmotivated are still unmotivated.
If you aren't listening to the calls for action now, you aren't going to listen to strangers barking orders at you in the middle of a fight.
But this is an old argument. Mostly, I don't like that we're upsetting age old basics of the game while we still haven't assimilated the previous 10 upsets. The help files are increasingly dated, the reliable newbie resources are horribly overpriced, and the idea of an overarching narrative has been largely shattered.
Why don't we just make playing the game simpler? I've gone through the new newbie process, and the greatest complaint I can level against it is it does not even suggest a final goal. It's like mental crack, moving you from one step to the other, and once you leave that shelter of the tutorial, the world is a dark and scary place. A single voice telling them, "Become an Aspect." would be a welcome addition.
"Make the game simpler" is a very hard thing to do, because the game requires a certain level of the depth and complexity to be interesting.
Myself, I remain convinced that a lot of the problem is that real newbies come at these classes blindly. They have no way of knowing that they'll be combat effective in teams at Fabled-ish in Chivalry as a Runeguard, but they'll need dual-trans to work it as a Hunter. They don't know that Druid and Cleric are fairly simple offensively and can run on about a skill and a half, while Renegade's going to require 3 trans skills and a lot of learning to accomplish anything.
And so the newbies who come into Druid and Warden and Knight and Cleric have a pretty easy and awesome time and can get involved in fighting on just their leveling credits.
And the newbies who start as Renegade, Assassin, Malignist, Hunter, Bard, NewMage, Summoner, or other such classes go "It's going to cost me HOW much to get my basic combat set? And I'm going to be garbage until I do?"
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
I would like to understand what do you think is complicated right now. The game, by design, is open-ended. You could try to become relevant in politics, be just a fanatical explorer, a tireless basher or a bloodthirsty PKer.
Amongst the other half a million things she works hard on, @Svorai (along with the other members of our amazing team) always keeps an eye on the bugs and has been editing helpfiles left and right to make them better.
It's an ongoing process, and we'd love your help in figuring out what could use improvement in the help files.
As for what everyone else said :
The narrative could be something as simple as, "Become an Aspect and resist all those bad things out in the wide world." It requires no great eloquence or complexity. Hell, you don't even need a reason to drop some army of NPCs on a player after that, as they grow to expect it after all that bashing.
And autocuring did not make things simpler conceptually. It obfuscated and didn't address the faults in curing, which were that it was impossible to read incoming messages fast enough and/or the cures were not very effective.
Now combat scrolls on by with what amounts to spam that the player still has little to no understanding of. I don't know how to improve it, My ideas are terrible, but it is going to be an increasing burden as the game continues to progress.
To be clear, what I'm referring to is the increasingly large amount of useless information players are exposed to.
What.
I know most of what you said is on their to do list.
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”