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Champions/Boneyards
So now that we've had the system for a while and the big issue about being able to guard boneyards with siege is resolved, I figured I'd post some feedback. I think there are a few big issues, but nothing too problematic with the underlying mechanics.
Firstly, could we make bones decay outside of a boneyard? Currently people are just stashing their bones in shops and stuff (presumably until they can amass enough for building/pushing to 100 all at once). This seems pretty counter to the intent of the system. I assume this is to allow people to work towards a boneyard over time, and not have half their bones decay on them when they're just getting near. Maybe a better thing to do here would be to drop the bones to build a boneyard to 5, and set the decay time to 15 rl days or something. Bones in a boneyard could just not decay. A lower buy in is probably a good thing in general, which leads me onto my second concern.
A hundred bones is a pretty crazy amount. I get that its meant to be very difficult, but given that these are contestable pk objectives, we're probably talking months before we see one come to fruition, best case. There just aren't enough champions for a hundred bones to be a reallistic target. You could cut this down to 50 and it'd still be very, very hard if someone had a mind to stop you reaching that goal. I get the impression from most people that they don't really like making a push to finish a boneyard, because its kind of unreallistic even if you're absolutely dead set on it currently.
The only way this is actually reallistically doable is actually one of my biggest issues with the system. You can just farm allied champions back and forth endlessly to produce 90% of your bones. This is kind of lame and is probably going to become the go to long term; could we make it so a single person's corpse can only produce a bone every hour? (Or barring that, make it so you can't remove bones from people in your circle, which might help mitigate slightly.)
Finally, I assume this is a design decision, but I'm just wondering if this could get revisited: could we have some way to locate all boneyards? Even if it is something that burns like 100 shards/a champion bone from our boneyard/whatever, searching threw every room in the game to find the most obscure location someone can find to build their boneyard in is kind of bleh.
But overall, I really like the system and think it should be awesome once people start getting more invested in it.
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."
IMO the big reason the cost needs to be lowered is that right now the cost is so high that nobody's going to be willing to take any risks with this. It's a conflict system that's so costly to engage in that people are going to go out of their way to minimize the role that conflict plays in it. As a prime example of that, we have Eldreth and Septus, two of the least conflict-averse players in the game, both were putting their boneyards on their siegelines simply because boneyards cost so much that it's not worthwhile to build them in a more strategic location.
It's sort of like player obelisks in that you have a conflict system where the smart play is to minimize the amount of conflict involved.
"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."
And let me tell you what a nice surprise it was to find out last night that indeed, cannons still will crush your face if you look at them wrong from outside city limits
edit: There are probably other boneyards, but the current boneyard lanscape is something like:
- Septus has a boneyard at the end of a siegeline, full of fellow AM bones
- Eldreth has a boneyard at the end of a siegeline, with no bones, because demonic moved them to non-decay rooms rather than have Iniar pull a Sani and just waste siege for hours on end.
- Other bones across three circles probably residing in non-decay rooms
Pretty sure this wasn't the intended effect.
(Ring): Lartus says, "Then it exploded."
(Ring): Zsetsu says, "Everyone's playing checkers, but Theophilus is playing chess."
I'm pretty sure its a design decision, not a bug. That's the kind of thing I'm pretty sure would've had to be made an exception since it works for nonowner getting of bones just fine.
Its just one that probably should not work that way.
Raiding champ yards has been the way I expand my boneyard for the past 72hrs.. not a single Champion kill to speak of. It makes collecting 100 bones a very onerous process.
but I also remember there was supposed to be a champion update -- after engineer(bleh) so maybe something is getting changed, etc when that comes around.
'I have separate concerns about 'failing' something with such a high time investment, but they don't belong here.'
Also can we elaborate on plagues in the lore? Tired of Celidon thinking I'm demonic plzkthx
2. Summoning a plague takes less than a minute. It should give you a continuation message every 10 seconds or so. If it doesn't please bug.
3. The idea of binding is that the plague is not happy to be summoned to you. It just wants to create chaos, not bend to your will. If you fail binding it will be aggressive to you and try to kill you. You should get messages whether the binding succeeds or fails. If you don't please let me know.
Plague binding can succeed with only one champion, but the odds are better than if you bring along friends. The longer you attempt to bind for the higher the likelihood it will succeed. The binding window right now is about 5 minutes.
@Sarrius idea of bones disappearing a few at a time through the summoning process would be a better option imo as well.
@Sarrius , from when Septus grabbed his 3 plagues, there is ZERO benefit to summoning a plague except for bragging rights on PLAGUES. The cost of time and effort to get 100 (now 50) bones has no end game benefit of any real consequence.
I would like to see some detail about the plagues in lore somewhere also. They have some neat attacks, etc and it would be cool to know more about them.
You build a giant macabre trophy pile of your fallen enemies bones, and use this bone pile in a ritualistic manner to summon an angry chaotic and nigh on untameable malignant force into the world to wreak havoc on a section of the world for your own bragging rights
How is this not demonic? It has the typical 'Badguy McNecromancer' MO written all over it.
Any knucklehead with a ranged attack could stop me from my summon and then I'm out 50 bones. No thanks. Make me immune to interference during the summoning or something. I don't want my long fought PK grind dashed because of 'lore implications'.
That last sentence is pretty much the rest of my argument, just FYI.
2.) When I refer to a timer, I mean once the Plague has been summoned and is camping in an area. There's no indication how long it has left before a successful resolution. By this, I mean PLAGUES should have a timer that tells the world how long they have before o successfully cap an area. It should also have an indicator for 'successfully bound' and, if not, the listed summoner should not still read SARRIUS. It should read (nobody) or something.
3.) There are no messages for failure. If you refer to my Quotes posts, I received no indication I had failed. Mid binding channel, the plague decided to plop down in Celidon. It would also have been nice to know that a plague has a 5 minute patience timer before doing whatever it likes. This goes back to my, 'i just spent an IRL month doing things the right way, why are you punishing me so heavily for lack of documentation?'. I think that even if correctly documented, the force of a Summoning Champion should linger and a plague that binds anywhere should be for the champion.
I'm sorry if I sound sour grapes, but I feel like my called shot on, '**** like this will keep happening' was very accurate. I do not think it was necessarily my fault that I lost my plague's potential area claim last night. Nothing about it indicated to me that I had failed until I killed my plague 5 hours later. My only indication of failure was not getting the area at the end.
In the end, I think this is one of those places that gameplay trumps lore. Please don't litter your conflict systems with pitfalls if the buy in to that conflict system is like a month IRL of grinding.
EDIT: to get my one plague, I had to poison the well utterly; the remaining Champion list is much smaller than Champion List would imply. The current populace is very sour on the concept. There's no encouragement to accept the risk of me jumping you. Bone diversity and bone supply are both plummetting. Plagues are going to be rare because nobody wants to play this system.
Edit2: other places we lack proper documentation.. why can't I plague Necropolis? Part of me loves this figure it out yourself game for plagues, but part of me thinks we should have put more knowledge behind the starting line, not the finish line.
Instead of binding to an area, I would say that the boneyard (anti-shrine?) should have to be in the area (increasing vulnerability), and summoning should start a 24h timer until it binds. For claiming, I'd just say that the existence of the nightmare should claim it, so if multiple sects summon their kaijuu then it becomes a race to kill while defending. Claiming could give a defile bonus, prevent other sects from putting up shrines, or some sort of shrine warfare benefit (sects don't really need any more PvE buffs).
As for the mechanical stuff, I have not heard one person who did plague summoning say that it was intuitive, even if Sarrius is a noob for not toggling a channel despite it not explicitly saying CHANNEL HERE (which I think everything that requires a soft or hard channel should in some way). I'm not sure if that happened to my Nihilim from one of my assistants or if the timer ran out on the binding process, so the fear of someone failing this and somehow ruining the binding process is why I tried to bind alone on my 2nd attempt (I've done four of these stupid frickin things). That backfired because I didn't successfully bind (it mentions being level-based, and I was at least L140 at the time). The 'unbinding' to the local area made me think that I had maybe just failed to send it away, so I guarded it any frickin way for no reason then put it down. The next time, I made sure I had 3 assistants who I trusted to channel, and voila.
Once it gets to the actual nightmare part without hiccups, it's fairly fun.
These are problems I have with any gameplay system in any game. If your goal is to get me to spend my time on something, you had best ensure I feel like I got something out of it. I feel like I got nothing out the 5hrs I wasted posturing to and threatening my own council IC (lol) and nothing out of the IRL month I spent thinning the herd of champions, raiding every boneyard (including the yards of semi-inactive friends, lol) and tearing my hair out over escape skills. To include a ton of pitfalls that could squander the entirety of my time investment just seems like poor design and I'm not afraid to call a hat a hat.
I like the idea of Plagues as a champion thing. I just think the target and the penalties are both pretty off scale. Champion Plagues being a 1v1 thing that happens at the frequency of one a week and once again on a weekend. I think that in an ideal world, we'd see that, but we have to hammer out the kinks and make it worth it for the bone supply to stabilize and that to happen.