Then we disagree completely. Death experience loss needs to be reintroduced everywhere. It was a mistake to remove it and, as far as I'm concerned, an effort to increase interest in combat and get people more involved in a group setting due to the dwindling population and needing to make everyone feel more connected.
All it's done is trivialize combat and lessen the impact death has upon the multiple facets it used to impact.
Death experience was a meaningless penalty because so many players didn't care about it at all. Any penalty big enough to make big fighters even take it into consideration is going to be so big that nobody else will want to get involved in PvP.
So the end result of penalties is that the people who would do suicide runs and fight against crazy odds still do those things, while the penalties keep most everybody else out of PvP entirely.
"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."
Not everyone cares about their level for its own sake, but even for them repeated failure has a tangible effect. If you're on the losing end so often that you can't get to or maintain Aspect, then you're going to be suffering a handicap when going up against players who can. In the old days of Achaea I saw people go on a suicidal loser bender and drop thirty levels in a half hour, and you better believe they regretted it afterwards. Probably during, too.
I think reintroducing xp loss on PvP-only deaths would be a good thing, overall.
Frustration and hair-tearing is (potentially) constructive on the combat side, but losing ten hours' worth of bashing xp because you got distracted by a cat or lagged for a second in no way adds to the game.
I think reintroducing xp loss on PvP-only deaths would be a good thing, overall.
Frustration and hair-tearing is (potentially) constructive on the combat side, but losing ten hours' worth of bashing xp because you got distracted by a cat or lagged for a second in no way adds to the game.
Why on earth would you put it back for pvp, but leave the autobashers alone to never worry? Mind you, I don't want it back for bashing either, but I definitely don't want it back for pvp.
Also @Iluv I'm glad you've seen the light. I've been saying that since it was first thrown out. You have people like @Jules who said "Yeah I'd quit." which makes me question whether she really wants to fight in the first place. Combat isn't something you should be babied in and it's something that SHOULD have consequences. You SHOULD want to tear your hair out and sometimes question your commitment to it. The answer should always be that yes, the suffering is worth it because Imperian combat is one of the greatest gaming experiences I've ever partaken of. It's unique. Experience can always be gained back and, in a world that is populated, bashing parties were an exceedingly common thing. People banded together to help that particular person who lost a level in a raid get it back.
Like i said. Consequences to dying impact far more than just one aspect of the game. Death: It helps the community grow stronger!
People get basically "cannibalized" out of games all the time that way. You can look at a game that is doing a lot of other things right and say "it's the xp loss, rawr, danger! Consequences!", but I think that's ****. I think you LOSE a lot of people that way, or certainly lose them from pvp. I don't ever want to go back down that road, no. The Dunns, Miziks and Santars, and Hirsts won't ever give a **** about those deaths, because they won't ever have to sweat about those deaths. But most other dudes will get ground up and spat out if they're foolish enough to even try.
And let's not forget that when that XP loss change went in, this game was probably in even more dire circumstances than it is right now, in no small part because people like Ahkan and Khizan were in full griefer mode, with no real restrictions, and the ability to cause almost unlimited, uh, grief. This is NOT the time to say "lol, pvp for Septuses and Iluvs only". I know this, because I scoured through your forums.
It needs to be good enough to WIN (and perhaps get some kind of extra prestige). If you need my XP too, basically building in a handicap for losers (WTF kind of idiot handicaps weaker opponents), then wth is wrong with you? Now, repeated smack talking can be a problem in -some- cases, and I can tell you for a fact it annoys some good PK-ers but @Iluv you said you had no problems with that... You also brought up a point about attracting people who are utterly unwilling to ever take any risks - that is more about our QoL goodies, and the absolute opt-in always nature of things than it is about XP loss.
Here is a thing. Septuses and Iluvs are never the ones who experience the "danger" and "consequences" in games that do **** like XP loss. It's ALWAYS Juleses, or whoever else. What you are really saying is "I want losers to lose extra hard, and I want THEM to have "danger" and "consequences"". I'd stop playing because my choices become "stop playing" or "try to bash back xp over and over and over" or "no more PK" and I HATE bashing, and I kind of suck at pvp, but I like it. And I am better at it than I ever have been. There is no way in hell I'd ever have been able to pvp in Achaea. Ever. And now you want to bring that crap back over here The only kind of "newbie" that has a shot in a game like that is someone like Sevhn. Because if you don't get pretty good FAST, you are going to be forced out of pvp. And then they act all surprised they don't have mid and lower tiers... On that note, I would not say there is a hell of a lot of "new blood" that lasts in Achaea. I see names from 10-12 years ago filling out that roster, when it comes to pvp. And that has got to be intimidating as hell for the average player.
Another note: I could go for Free PK areas in our game, maybe. They are kind of crap in a game like Achaea, because what they basically end up boiling down to there is "feeding the deer so you can shoot them". The gulf between PK-er and non-com is pretty extreme there, but a lot of power bashers can't resist the good XP (especially in a game where XP is much, much harder to come by). PK-ers often basically just wait for the easy kills to show up, and can wipe entire groups... I always avoided those areas for that reason, but I still think it's a "bleh" situation. Here, in our game as it stands, you might see people use the area as a way to say "hi, I'm up for stuff".
Also, @Sarthan, I wish I could l find this one comment from an article about gaming and XP loss... but what it basically boiled down to was this:
The commenter had a friend, and they were all playing a game that had XP loss. And the friend died a lot. So they did what you are saying, they banded together to help him. But the friend felt so incredibly guilty about having to have his friends help him over and over he just quit. I feel EXACTLY like that about all kinds of similar things, btw. In fact, I was ready to quit my sect for the exact same reason, before they tweaked that.
Furthermore, having a God who is more than an abstract noncorporeal idea but is an actual physical being that will ALWAYS be stronger than you, but also elevates you to a position of authority and cherishes your service does wonders for a character.
This is pretty much everything I hate about the god/player dynamic.
First, you have an admin, who was almost certainly a former player, playing an all-powerful in-game role. I already find this problematic.
Further, that admin/God is going to establish close relationships with a few players. INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC.
EDIT: one interesting thing a God can do, yes, is provide what we in the military would call "topcover" when you do something that could be unpopular (but also possibly awesome). I remain leery of Gods as a whole though.
If the idea is to bring in more people, I think having 'goals' is a good idea. Some herculean group task that everyone on a team can contribute to in some way. Something to cause banding together, but not to encourage PK since that seems to be a common complaint. It could be almost anything. Resurrecting a dead god, building a new city, collecting the scattered pieces of an ancient war machine. If you wanted everyone to band together (instead of teams), it could be some World Threat (like the rise of an ancient uncontrollable abomination). These things are pretty trope-y, but they are tropes for a reason.
If you wanted teams (for each alignment), it could be a competition that somehow didn't encourage PK (maybe sentient mobs are carrying pieces of the war machine, not knowing what they are so bashers could collect them). Hell, you could combine all these things. Protect your newly built cities from the thing you resurrected that wasn't a god, but a Massive Evil by using the ancient war machines.
People love contributing to a task and seeing bars fill and numbers go up. That's what every reward system is built on.
The real difficult task is to keep this trend going. Maybe the evil never dies. Maybe it is only put down for a rl month. Maybe the machines need to be maintained. Maybe the cities are assaulted by lesser evils.
Then if you want people to PK, just don't punish PK. People will find reasons to fight, they always do. Let them fight, but give them an out if they don't.
Here's one. Let orgs bounty for harvesting at shardfalls. It's one death. But believe me, it's probably one death too many (and too much being hunted at times when it is not convenient) for the kind of people who show up to shardfalls (and keep coming back if they get killed) but refuse to EVER fight. Those are the sort of people that I do worry about, because I do think our QoL features, and the ability to totally and completely dictate when you are and aren't killable does have the potential to attract people who absolutely DO hate any and all risk (but are also totally willing to take advantage of the situation in a way that is absolutely infuriating for the other side), and I've discussed it before (without much success).
It also means if I scurry away from a shardfall when Iluv shows up (which I probably will, eep). She can hunt me down (I probably won't run that hard, I don't like keeping bounties on me, and I usually won't try too hard to avoid letting someone collect one unless I hate them personally).
I was the highest level player in midkemiaonline and xp should be lost upon dying as it makes dying be less desirable. The grind should feel like a grind.....just my two cents.
The only people who want it to "feel like a grind" (more than it already does) are (some) people like you who LOVE grinding, and want to be made to feel extra special for it over the other plebes who DON'T love grinding. No thanks. There are so many wonderful things about being able to balance around level 100, and everyone still reveres/makes fun of Shou for being the game's uncontested power basher.
As a new player coming from Midkemiaonline which had xp loss in pve I will say I was shocked that it wasn't in Imperian. I am almost level 97 now after a week and each time I die it just has the feeling of no matter , which to me speaks volumes on how I handle my character. In many ways it makes me care less about him than I should.
I was the highest level player in midkemiaonline and xp should be lost upon dying as it makes dying be less desirable. The grind should feel like a grind.....just my two cents.
I've read this over and heard much that I agree and disagree with from a lot of people. Yes, circles/affinity was a dumb idea to begin with in my opinion. I agree with that. This is reflected, as @Khizan said, in his actions as Antioch's leader as well as the citizens of Antioch. However, I agree with @Jules 100% on the death xp loss. Why? As a combatant it's enough to lose and lose handily. I don't need to be penalized for playing; I rage enough even from spars when Iluv hands me my **** 5,000 times in a row and I can't seem to "figure out" what I need to do. Believe me, the frustration is there even without the penalty.
As for the bashing xp loss: why. Sure aspect isn't "prestigious", but I think the attitude of players here in Imperian is different: we don't want it to be. We don't want it to be exclusive. It's an established game with established players. Why make that part of the game more difficult than it needs be when frankly those that have no interest in combat typically stop bashing well before that point anyway? There are a few oddballs that don't because they genuinely love the grind just for the grind, like @Tikal; but those are few and far between.
On another note I love the idea of dropping the whole half-in half-out roleplay. More freedom is always exciting; it leads to more positive interaction. I like the fact that my friends can be in different places on different 'sides' and we can go do our thing and kill each other in battles then hang out and talk about it later. @Iluv and @Sevhn consistently make me QQ but I love them both hahaha.
@Tyden Hitting 100 isn't really a prize here. It's mostly notable for being the point where you cap your stats and get to play in PvP without a handicap. It's also the point where the REAL grind starts as you attempt to bash up the gold and XP to buy aspect stuff, with an entire combat system locked behind hitting that 100 point(monoliths). Keep in mind that 97 is only a little more than 2/3 of the way to level 100 as far as XP goes. Additionally, at what point in time did you buy up the artifacts that you have now, because grinding up XP is considerably slower without artifacts. Lastly, as others have pointed out, death xp loss impacts lowbies, casual players, people with small budgets(like those of us that have relied on Elite for basically everything we have), and manual bashers disproportionately. Losing a small portion of a level means absolutely nothing to someone with a bashing system that can regain it in minutes without any actual effort on their part, but it is a very large deal to someone that only spends a few hours a week in the game or to someone that goes entirely manual for one reason or another.
The grind absolutely is still a grind to people that aren't power bashers. Every change we have made to reduce the grind has been welcomed with open arms by basically everybody in the community.
Death is still scary enough for 101% of AM to have flippers.
I think keeping "what happens in shardfalls, stays in shardfalls" is good. What should probably be done at this point is take away single shard harvesting and introduce features that increase the scarcity and desirability of shards.
It so depends on what you mean by that. Septus is always going to have plenty of shards. Iluv is always going to have plenty of shards. Jules however, might just have to say "welp, no more shard skill X for me". Could easily end up another thing that buffs already strong players, and debuffs weaker ones.
I love the idea of trying to encourage orgs to get out there more though, but I also don't want the weaker orgs to end up in a death spiral. I agree that this is surely where there is some room to do SOMETHING though.
Bashing up past 100 isn't a grind it's more of a time issue. I've been there with other places and well I stand by what I said in not having a loss with pve death was a shocking discovery.
As a tangent, permanent aspect monoliths are one of the culprets for entirely killing one of our more unscripted pk systems. Monoliths are pretty much irrelevant now.
Death isn't scary. People don't want to die because being alive is more fun. Death xp isn't really the root of the issue, though. The real issue is a lack of consequence in general. Frankly? I don't think xp loss will solve any of imperian's problems.
I think the issue stems from the other side of things, actually. There is no consequence for winning.
So. Stavenn rolls up to a shardfall, wipes a Kinsarmar party.
So what?
What is the motivation for that Kinsarmar party to return to try again? They are not fighting over anything of consequence. Shardfalls are meaningless. Caravans are meaningless. If there is no incentive to win, there is no emotional investment in the conflict. If there is no emotional investment in the conflict, players go elsewhere.
So yes, I'm going to say in order to win, the other side needs to lose something. It does not need to be a material "you lost xp/gold/they shook you down for all your worldly possessions". But if losing it doesn't matter, its not worth fighting for, and people won't fight for it. Simple as that.
I'm going to use a horrible example here. Obelisks pre shard attunes.
People loathe the obelisk system. It has a lot of things that make gaming it way too easy. But people would fight harder over pre attuned obelisks than anything else, because losing those obelisks was a big deal. This is a system that people actively dislike, but it had some ridiculous participation when those fights went down.
At the end of the day, there are two kinds of pk audiences. People who want instanced pk where the outcome doesn't really matter, and people who want winning to mean something in the context of the game world. You can rarely have it both ways.
Septus, I think you're pretty dead on with the monoliths.
For a lot of the rest, I agree, but what do you do when Antioch controls the only obelisk that matters for hundreds of in-game years and everyone else has gone "screw it" (for that matter, see Achaea's version, where much the same thing happened)?
I think that almost always fails to get addressed. It's great in the short term until you literally exhaust/completely demoralize the losing side. And at that point, you either have to reset things maybe? Or hope that the power dynamic really does shift? Or, I guess, hope that fresh blood/new suckers show up.
Death isn't scary. People don't want to die because being alive is more fun. Death xp isn't really the root of the issue, though. The real issue is a lack of consequence in general. Frankly? I don't think xp loss will solve any of imperian's problems.
I think the issue stems from the other side of things, actually. There is no consequence for winning.
So. Stavenn rolls up to a shardfall, wipes a Kinsarmar party.
So what?
What is the motivation for that Kinsarmar party to return to try again? They are not fighting over anything of consequence. Shardfalls are meaningless. Caravans are meaningless. If there is no incentive to win, there is no emotional investment in the conflict. If there is no emotional investment in the conflict, players go elsewhere.
This is the big problem, yeah. The thing that ultimately killed conflict here isn't that we don't care if we lose, it's that we don't care if we win because none of the prizes matter at all. That's part of why the last few events have gone over so poorly, for that matter; there's seemingly nothing at stake and so nobody really cares about winning them.
"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."
Septus, I think you're pretty dead on with the monoliths.
For a lot of the rest, I agree, but what do you do when Antioch controls the only obelisk that matters for hundreds of in-game years and everyone else has gone "screw it" (for that matter, see Achaea's version, where much the same thing happened)?
I think that almost always fails to get addressed. It's great in the short term until you literally exhaust/completely demoralize the losing side. And at that point, you either have to reset things maybe? Or hope that the power dynamic really does shift? Or, I guess, hope that fresh blood/new suckers show up.
We have the best obelisk because the best obelisk doesn't honestly matter that much anymore. Noone wants to invest time and effort into a system that takes long term planning where they can burn a redshard and get most of the benefits at a critical moment without bothering.
I'm assuming you're talking about old Achaea icons - they were very different, in that they had a ludicrus up front gold cost. Raising one and failing was literally throwing money down the drain, and to add insult to injury you went on a 100 (real) days cooldown. They were also a horrible positive feedback loop. The good thing about obelisks is that they're not - you can't reallistically hold all 6 longterm against someone (competent) who actually is of a mind to stop you doing so.
On that note, if owned monoliths went away, what would people suggest replacing them with? Or just... ditch them? I would be okay with that. For one, I freaking hate bashing and would have been perfectly content to barely do it again after Aspect, but I have real doubts that people in general would feel that way (this would be a wonderful time for me to be wrong).
EDIT: Actually I am too hard on bashing. It is cathartic and relaxing sometimes. SOMETIMES.
I would remove shard skills, obelisks, shrines and sect rituals. Strip the game back to the bare essentials and conflate+reboot conflict systems periodically.
I agree with you Mr. No City , but no one else does (or, they didn't last time I checked). Being in a city is absolutely mandatory at this point, and sect membership frankly isn't far behind. I don't like the degree of enforced membership we have in player run anything, even if I happen to find the current regime pretty tolerable. That said, what kind of bare essentials are we talking, and what are we conflating, lego blocks? >.> <.<
Doing 'seasons' of shard skills (without the gold investment) would be interesting, actually. We know the trees now, but it would be fun to see how people prioritized things differently with the slate cleaned.
Edit: Obviously you'd need to do different colors of shards if you wanted any sort of meaningful change, so people couldn't just rebuy everything on the first day. It would also let you rebalance the trees, which is probably something that needs to happen anyway.
1. We are currently doing an update to shards and shardfalls. I will post the help files in the next day or two as we are just about done with the bulk of the code. Would like feedback and we will make adjustments, additions, changes based on that.
2. Monoliths are high on the redo/update list to make them more interesting. I would like to do it immediately after shards, but we may give it a couple weeks at least before we do that.
It looks like people are not interested in XP loss coming back for the most part. So unless I am really wrong there, I will ignore that.
I would like to make it much harder to get to level 100 again. People leveling there in a week seems a little too simple. I think it is bad for real newbies to power through quite that fast without learning the game. That said, established players do need a way to power through levels. This is one of the things on my list to deal with, but not really high. Any thoughts, comments, concerns with that?
The people who are doing that are turning their basher on and running it for... TOO GD LONG. They also make a list of EXACTLY when things repop and go on a circuit... keeping everything killed off, basically.
Something something diminishing returns. Please do not punish the filthy casuals/truly manual people like me who are having a damned good day if we can stomach 2-3 hours of bashing.
1. We are currently doing an update to shards and shardfalls. I will post the help files in the next day or two as we are just about done with the bulk of the code. Would like feedback and we will make adjustments, additions, changes based on that.
2. Monoliths are high on the redo/update list to make them more interesting. I would like to do it immediately after shards, but we may give it a couple weeks at least before we do that.
It looks like people are not interested in XP loss coming back for the most part. So unless I am really wrong there, I will ignore that.
I would like to make it much harder to get to level 100 again. People leveling there in a week seems a little too simple. I think it is bad for real newbies to power through quite that fast without learning the game. That said, established players do need a way to power through levels. This is one of the things on my list to deal with, but not really high. Any thoughts, comments, concerns with that?
The trouble with game is that it has not enough players... I know Mud games are not very popular in the world but I believe Imperian has some potential. I don't know if you are responsible with that (search engine visibility, advertising, social networking, etc) but we may have more visitors to Imperian.
I think that having level 100 fairly easy to get to is a good thing.
1) Credits. Players basically can't participate in this game for real until they're at least single trans. They can't notably help in group fights. They can't hunt well. Level 100 is basically require for new player to play the game for real unless they're willing to throw down money, and I feel like they're more likely to throw down money once the hit 100 and actually get to do things.
2) Area Efficiency. Most of the established players are at L100+, therefore most of the new content is generated for people in the 90-100 range. The longer you make people take at the lower levels, the more content you need for those lower levels, and that's content that most people will outgrow and never use again.
3) Health. You can take that L60 dude to a shardfall but he's gonna die when he's sneezed at. Getting to max health is important if you want to get into PvP, and you should want to get people into PvP.
Imperian now is sort of like WoW in that the game really doesn't start until level cap.
"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."
I took Jeremy's comment as "it should take a bit longer than it currently is for some of these guys who seem to just be powering through it", not "lol, let's make getting 100 soooper hard and try to balance around level 80 again".
Comments
So the end result of penalties is that the people who would do suicide runs and fight against crazy odds still do those things, while the penalties keep most everybody else out of PvP entirely.
"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."
I think reintroducing xp loss on PvP-only deaths would be a good thing, overall.
Frustration and hair-tearing is (potentially) constructive on the combat side, but losing ten hours' worth of bashing xp because you got distracted by a cat or lagged for a second in no way adds to the game.
And let's not forget that when that XP loss change went in, this game was probably in even more dire circumstances than it is right now, in no small part because people like Ahkan and Khizan were in full griefer mode, with no real restrictions, and the ability to cause almost unlimited, uh, grief. This is NOT the time to say "lol, pvp for Septuses and Iluvs only". I know this, because I scoured through your forums.
It needs to be good enough to WIN (and perhaps get some kind of extra prestige). If you need my XP too, basically building in a handicap for losers (WTF kind of idiot handicaps weaker opponents), then wth is wrong with you? Now, repeated smack talking can be a problem in -some- cases, and I can tell you for a fact it annoys some good PK-ers but @Iluv you said you had no problems with that... You also brought up a point about attracting people who are utterly unwilling to ever take any risks - that is more about our QoL goodies, and the absolute opt-in always nature of things than it is about XP loss.
Here is a thing. Septuses and Iluvs are never the ones who experience the "danger" and "consequences" in games that do **** like XP loss. It's ALWAYS Juleses, or whoever else. What you are really saying is "I want losers to lose extra hard, and I want THEM to have "danger" and "consequences"". I'd stop playing because my choices become "stop playing" or "try to bash back xp over and over and over" or "no more PK" and I HATE bashing, and I kind of suck at pvp, but I like it. And I am better at it than I ever have been. There is no way in hell I'd ever have been able to pvp in Achaea. Ever. And now you want to bring that crap back over here
Another note: I could go for Free PK areas in our game, maybe. They are kind of crap in a game like Achaea, because what they basically end up boiling down to there is "feeding the deer so you can shoot them". The gulf between PK-er and non-com is pretty extreme there, but a lot of power bashers can't resist the good XP (especially in a game where XP is much, much harder to come by). PK-ers often basically just wait for the easy kills to show up, and can wipe entire groups... I always avoided those areas for that reason, but I still think it's a "bleh" situation. Here, in our game as it stands, you might see people use the area as a way to say "hi, I'm up for stuff".
The commenter had a friend, and they were all playing a game that had XP loss. And the friend died a lot. So they did what you are saying, they banded together to help him. But the friend felt so incredibly guilty about having to have his friends help him over and over he just quit. I feel EXACTLY like that about all kinds of similar things, btw. In fact, I was ready to quit my sect for the exact same reason, before they tweaked that.
First, you have an admin, who was almost certainly a former player, playing an all-powerful in-game role. I already find this problematic.
Further, that admin/God is going to establish close relationships with a few players. INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC.
EDIT: one interesting thing a God can do, yes, is provide what we in the military would call "topcover" when you do something that could be unpopular (but also possibly awesome). I remain leery of Gods as a whole though.
If you wanted teams (for each alignment), it could be a competition that somehow didn't encourage PK (maybe sentient mobs are carrying pieces of the war machine, not knowing what they are so bashers could collect them). Hell, you could combine all these things. Protect your newly built cities from the thing you resurrected that wasn't a god, but a Massive Evil by using the ancient war machines.
People love contributing to a task and seeing bars fill and numbers go up. That's what every reward system is built on.
The real difficult task is to keep this trend going. Maybe the evil never dies. Maybe it is only put down for a rl month. Maybe the machines need to be maintained. Maybe the cities are assaulted by lesser evils.
Then if you want people to PK, just don't punish PK. People will find reasons to fight, they always do. Let them fight, but give them an out if they don't.
Also hi I haven't played in like 3 years.
It also means if I scurry away from a shardfall when Iluv shows up (which I probably will, eep). She can hunt me down (I probably won't run that hard, I don't like keeping bounties on me, and I usually won't try too hard to avoid letting someone collect one unless I hate them personally).
The only people who want it to "feel like a grind" (more than it already does) are (some) people like you who LOVE grinding, and want to be made to feel extra special for it over the other plebes who DON'T love grinding. No thanks. There are so many wonderful things about being able to balance around level 100, and everyone still reveres/makes fun of Shou for being the game's uncontested power basher.
I was the highest level player in midkemiaonline and xp should be lost upon dying as it makes dying be less desirable. The grind should feel like a grind.....just my two cents.
As for the bashing xp loss: why. Sure aspect isn't "prestigious", but I think the attitude of players here in Imperian is different: we don't want it to be. We don't want it to be exclusive. It's an established game with established players. Why make that part of the game more difficult than it needs be when frankly those that have no interest in combat typically stop bashing well before that point anyway? There are a few oddballs that don't because they genuinely love the grind just for the grind, like @Tikal; but those are few and far between.
On another note I love the idea of dropping the whole half-in half-out roleplay. More freedom is always exciting; it leads to more positive interaction. I like the fact that my friends can be in different places on different 'sides' and we can go do our thing and kill each other in battles then hang out and talk about it later. @Iluv and @Sevhn consistently make me QQ but I love them both hahaha.
The grind absolutely is still a grind to people that aren't power bashers. Every change we have made to reduce the grind has been welcomed with open arms by basically everybody in the community.
Death is still scary enough for 101% of AM to have flippers.
I love the idea of trying to encourage orgs to get out there more though, but I also don't want the weaker orgs to end up in a death spiral. I agree that this is surely where there is some room to do SOMETHING though.
Bashing up past 100 isn't a grind it's more of a time issue. I've been there with other places and well I stand by what I said in not having a loss with pve death was a shocking discovery.
Death isn't scary. People don't want to die because being alive is more fun. Death xp isn't really the root of the issue, though. The real issue is a lack of consequence in general. Frankly? I don't think xp loss will solve any of imperian's problems.
I think the issue stems from the other side of things, actually. There is no consequence for winning.
So. Stavenn rolls up to a shardfall, wipes a Kinsarmar party.
So what?
What is the motivation for that Kinsarmar party to return to try again? They are not fighting over anything of consequence. Shardfalls are meaningless. Caravans are meaningless. If there is no incentive to win, there is no emotional investment in the conflict. If there is no emotional investment in the conflict, players go elsewhere.
So yes, I'm going to say in order to win, the other side needs to lose something. It does not need to be a material "you lost xp/gold/they shook you down for all your worldly possessions". But if losing it doesn't matter, its not worth fighting for, and people won't fight for it. Simple as that.
I'm going to use a horrible example here. Obelisks pre shard attunes.
People loathe the obelisk system. It has a lot of things that make gaming it way too easy. But people would fight harder over pre attuned obelisks than anything else, because losing those obelisks was a big deal. This is a system that people actively dislike, but it had some ridiculous participation when those fights went down.
At the end of the day, there are two kinds of pk audiences. People who want instanced pk where the outcome doesn't really matter, and people who want winning to mean something in the context of the game world. You can rarely have it both ways.
For a lot of the rest, I agree, but what do you do when Antioch controls the only obelisk that matters for hundreds of in-game years and everyone else has gone "screw it" (for that matter, see Achaea's version, where much the same thing happened)?
I think that almost always fails to get addressed. It's great in the short term until you literally exhaust/completely demoralize the losing side. And at that point, you either have to reset things maybe? Or hope that the power dynamic really does shift? Or, I guess, hope that fresh blood/new suckers show up.
"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."
I'm assuming you're talking about old Achaea icons - they were very different, in that they had a ludicrus up front gold cost. Raising one and failing was literally throwing money down the drain, and to add insult to injury you went on a 100 (real) days cooldown. They were also a horrible positive feedback loop. The good thing about obelisks is that they're not - you can't reallistically hold all 6 longterm against someone (competent) who actually is of a mind to stop you doing so.
EDIT: Actually I am too hard on bashing. It is cathartic and relaxing sometimes. SOMETIMES.
Edit: Obviously you'd need to do different colors of shards if you wanted any sort of meaningful change, so people couldn't just rebuy everything on the first day. It would also let you rebalance the trees, which is probably something that needs to happen anyway.
1. We are currently doing an update to shards and shardfalls. I will post the help files in the next day or two as we are just about done with the bulk of the code. Would like feedback and we will make adjustments, additions, changes based on that.
2. Monoliths are high on the redo/update list to make them more interesting. I would like to do it immediately after shards, but we may give it a couple weeks at least before we do that.
It looks like people are not interested in XP loss coming back for the most part. So unless I am really wrong there, I will ignore that.
I would like to make it much harder to get to level 100 again. People leveling there in a week seems a little too simple. I think it is bad for real newbies to power through quite that fast without learning the game. That said, established players do need a way to power through levels. This is one of the things on my list to deal with, but not really high. Any thoughts, comments, concerns with that?
Something something diminishing returns. Please do not punish the filthy casuals/truly manual people like me who are having a damned good day if we can stomach 2-3 hours of bashing.
1) Credits. Players basically can't participate in this game for real until they're at least single trans. They can't notably help in group fights. They can't hunt well. Level 100 is basically require for new player to play the game for real unless they're willing to throw down money, and I feel like they're more likely to throw down money once the hit 100 and actually get to do things.
2) Area Efficiency. Most of the established players are at L100+, therefore most of the new content is generated for people in the 90-100 range. The longer you make people take at the lower levels, the more content you need for those lower levels, and that's content that most people will outgrow and never use again.
3) Health. You can take that L60 dude to a shardfall but he's gonna die when he's sneezed at. Getting to max health is important if you want to get into PvP, and you should want to get people into PvP.
Imperian now is sort of like WoW in that the game really doesn't start until level cap.
"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."