January Forum Town Hall

Eoghan

As I mentioned in our 2020 prospective, one of the things I'm going to be doing each month is a "town hall" of sorts here on the forums. You're able to post questions you'd like answers on, and in a week or two, I'll close the thread and start posting responses!

You can post about just about any subject impacting the game, like roleplay, lore, combat, and mechanics, but please be sure to keep your questions constructive!

Please do NOT use this thread to attack (or even reply to) other players - if your post isn't a question to the administration, it will be edited or removed.

I look forward to reading and answering your questions!

Aeterna Silphium

A few questions:

1. You have mentioned opening up the old temples. I don't expect a timeline out of that, but does that include the inner rooms and more secret areas of them as well so they're accessible to all players? Are there going to be limitations? Are they even going to be on the same plane or tucked away somewhere where people can have a good poke at them while not affecting combat by giving more nooks, crannies, and hidey holes with nonstandard exits?
2. The typo queue seems to be getting pretty unwieldy. Are the new entities/volunteer staff going to help go through those and knock them out? For instance, the kestrels in underworld kinsarmar still throw non-ascii characters around.
3. On a similar vein, is there any plan to poke around the help files to make them more intuitive? As a returning player, it was fairly difficult to access the appropriate help files at times.
4. From a lore perspective, there is a considerable amount of "lost knowledge", such as the meanings of each of the suns and history on a lot of the old areas, not to mention smatterings of lore for the old bashing area push in the mid-2000's such as Menanon, Baneward Keep, the Macabre Tunnels, etc. It'd be pretty interesting to have help files for those area help files reference event posts that are relevant so a curious player can more swiftly access the information about those places. Is this something the admin are interested in as lore support?

Ryse

Hi!

First and foremost, thank you for the visibility and interaction with us. We Imperian survivors often feel like the ignored IRE player base, and it’s really uplifting to have an admin accessible. Considering you folks work for free, I hope you recognize our gratitude. 

A few questions, off the top of my head.

1. Classleads. One disheartening thing many of us face is investing time and money into a favorite class, then a classlead completely changes it to something different, or renders it less than useful. It’s further disheartening when the only hope of adjustment lies a year away in the next classlead round. Is there any hope of earlier adjustments?

2. More of a “pick your brain” question. You posted a chart of circle populations going back a long time, and Demonic has historically been underpopulated compared to the others. Any idea, from the admin perspective, as to why? And any ideas on what could be done to bolster this? (A healthy, active, visible demonic playerbase is definitely required, of course!)

3. Can you give us a “peek under the hood” on artifacts and mechanics (and whatever) you’d like to see implemented, even if they’re not slated for this year’s roadmap?

Naruj

I'd like to echo the thank you post to Dec and you for doing what you can to keep the game fresh and interesting. The effort is definitely having an impact, the player base is larger and more engaged than the days immediately before the Free to Play announcement was made.

The only frustration I have with Imperian these days is lag. Is there anything being done, or is there anything that can be done, to address the pervasive lag the game seems to have these days? It gets worse in team fights, but there are noticeable delays even performing standard actions.

Japa

Hello,

I'll echo what others have said, you guys are really awesome for keeping the game running. I know it can't be easy with the limited resources you have and all the complaining people do. 

Anyway, I'm curious on if there are any plans to make changes to circles (or organizations in general). Since the average number of players is typically on the lower side, there always seems to be at least one circle on the butt end of things.

Right now Khandava/Demonic is on the lower side of players but it could theoretically be any organization if people shift around.

I’m also curious if there are any planned changes for the raiding system. Raiding right now strongly encourages only raiding during off hours because it is super hard to win a raid if there are defenders around. I understand people will always raid during off hours, which is fine, but I’d like to see it be more fun to raid anytime. Part of the fun of PvP is having opposition.

I don't know how hard it would be to implement here but on Achaea they put in an upvote system for ideas. Do you think that would be beneficial here to kinda highlight the things players want most? Could possibly do something like that for classleads too.

Eoghan

Sent in via messages:

A question for the townhall forum. A few years back there was an ice golem event, where players got collars of hardened diachaim. Originally, there were hints that you wanted to collect these, because they'd have a use later on. To this date, they still have no use. During a twitch stream about two, maybe three years ago, this matter was brought up, and it was yet again mentioned that they'll probably have a use soon. But again, that was at least two years ago. is it safe to assume the collars won't have a use?

Sumie

Two questions.

Any plans on releasing new races? Apparently 30 races is not enough for me.

Would it be possible to bring back events like the valentine's festival/Halloween festival with all those minigame things. I do need to collect another crown. Guess it would Anti-magick's queen of love. I realize it is probably not as easy as flipping a switch and would likely involve having to update the spaghetti mess of code used from before, but those were quite fun and we haven't had them for a while. 

Casyia

Hi! Thanks for having this open! I don't post much on forums but I think this is a really great method for players to get involved.

My question is... are there plans to balance the beacon/quartz system? 

My understanding is, when shards were first released, they were riftable. This caused some issues because players were able to stockpile vast amounts of shards. We're having a similar problem here with quartz. Currently, Magick cities have absolute dominance (5+ beacons) in all areas where beacons can be placed. This happened before my time, and I imagine that there is also a considerable amount of quartz in their stockpiles that doesn't decay. Because of this big gap, it's virtually impossible for other cities to compete in this environment, and thus, discourages new players from getting involved in caravans. New beacons we place get destroyed relatively quick because there is no way for us to overcome the quartz gap. This essentially makes it so organizations with beacon/quartz dominance will maintain a permanent advantage of sentries/caravan alerts that other organizations do not have, thus further compounding the problem.

Thanks again for this opportunity to be heard!

Eoghan

Thank you all for your questions! I'll put together answers and have them for you soon!

Eoghan

The answers for January and February are up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y_tU6K-JHw

I didn't answer these in advance or write a script, and it shows, but hopefully the answers are what you're looking for.