In regards to the instance bashing areas. At some point, we had some event where a rift opened in each org, and you could walk in and get your own instanced bashing. All of the mobs spawned to the level of the person who entered first - so if a level 10 kid walked in the, mobs were geared for a level 10 person. Anyone could follow you through and suck up sweet xp. The rooms were randomly generated - and you could prism/portals/whatever to someone in the 'pit', letting you kill them. Every time you left, you were dumped back in your org iirc - you just had to find the exit.
From what I remember that worked pretty darn well - people were getting ganked for being out with pk reasons saddled on them, and everyone else just bashed.
I thoroughly liked that bashing event - mostly because I ground out some amazing experience before we had achievements put in place and I was in my lower nineties.
With this new age of Mortals, the Death of the Gods
(obviously) has been a huge impact upon the population of Aetherius. And I
think, defining lines within the storyline could really aid and emphasize it
from the centuries of having these Gods be present within our character’s
lives. Here are some ways the storyline (in my opinion) could be bolstered/filled
in/reinforced:
*I know that we have most of the old Temples closed. Can we
reverse this and make them ruins? Something that has a little bit more
atmosphere than getting kicked from the area (like the Temple of Shallah). Old mobs from the Gods could provide a brief
education that the HELP SCROLLS don’t have anymore. We have our library books
and old trinkets in memento, but I think opening up this area could add in some
quests even. Or at least a richer environment for Imperian and this huge event
you guys pulled off. And hey, people
might roleplay within ruined temples. OR there could be PK in there. Who knows?
*Memorable figures within events that don’t just die and
disappear, they should get placed somewhere. Perhaps even becoming quest mobs
which open up a network of little quests that could be done or even tangents
off of these plots. I remember in one event a while ago, where the Blue Temple
collapsed. There was an awesome ending to that. But where is that angry Kvand
spirit? Not in Dis. He could be used to great effect down there if someone had
some ideas, ripe with quest sadism.
*Imperian is advertised as an apocalyptic type sort of deal,
in my mind. Moons shatter, Immortals go poof. We need more events that slowly build on the
desperation of the world, or at least issue subtle reminders that we have some big
issues going on internally that could fuel more roleplay. We have shardfalls, that’s neat for
pk. But for those of us who like to write a wall of text (cough cough) once and
a while, I’d like to see some general emotes other than those regarding the
stars, volcanoes, and suns. And the ones we already have should be modified to
fit the mood of the world, which is now much –darker-. Don’t have anyone who
wants to do it? I’ll happily volunteer to work with someone on it. Seriously.
*Make way for building new areas. Hold an event. Make
something happen. Khous just appeared, like BAM. Maybe next time some mobs can
travel to a city and ask for help? It’d be more complex for sure, but I like it
when areas are discovered the old fashioned way.
*Guild events or guild role play should be utilized more.
Make these mobs come to life, and maybe influence the course of the guild to
change. Perhaps influence them to do or–not- do certain things. Though, I must
say, this would have to have people involved in going to the guildhalls.
*Aspect roleplay perks? Maybe introduce levels to a (poor
man’s) Phantasmal Diadem. Instead of having it an artifact only sold at
auction. You could buy a lvl 1 in aspect perks for x amount of gold or points,
and so on. Perhaps it would limit on the characters of exit and enter, or maybe
work like an ambience orb personalized to the character. I would really enjoy
something like this. And I’d bash up to whatever level in order to get it. I
don’t know about other people. We have
the staff of illusion, the death sight token and probably other things I can
think of, but I want something that gives me more freedom than having to dish
out money that I (as a poor college student) will never have.
I mean, the Aspect
Powers are fairly utilitarian and useful. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to change any
of those up. I’m just enthusiastic about making this game even more
customizable.
*You know those animal companions in our professions? Well,
like in AB Beastmastery, give the other people the ability to
<animal/seraph/elemental/> emote. I know tons of people who’d appreciate
this. Pretty please? I know the physical appearance of the please doesn’t help
much. But I would really love it if it did.
*Different token familiars. We have all seen the familiars in
token wares. Maybe switch those out? They’ve been in circulation for maybe a year;
it could be good to change them. More moola for you, makes you happier.
*Make way for building new areas. Hold an event. Make
something happen. Khous just appeared, like BAM. Maybe next time some mobs can
travel to a city and ask for help? It’d be more complex for sure, but I like it
when areas are discovered the old fashioned way.
This is always iffy, and the backlash can easily make this kind of thing not worth the effort. Volunteers put a lot of time and effort into those events, and, historically, the general response from the community starts at "meh" and it only goes downhill from there.
This is for several reasons, but the main one is that an event designed to release <thing> has no player agency; the outcome of the event is pre-determined and the players cannot affect it. It's not like they're going to create and beta-test new skills/areas/etc and then throw them away because the handful of people involved in the event didn't like how the event went and decided they wanted to work against it.
And so the event ends up being on rails, and the rails are really hard to hide. This means that, in most cases, you never get the feeling that you were involved. You were just along for the ride. This generates a lot of frustration and bad feelings from the people who got really involved in the event only to find out that their contribution to the vent was approximately frak-all nothing, since the ending was already predetermined.
If you look over all the events of this type, you will see very very few that had much positive feedback at all, and a whole lot of feedback that basically consists of "If there was absolutely nothing I could do to affect this, why did you even make it look like my contribution was meaningful?"
You mentioned Khous in your post, and it got a little mini-event and an events post. That's about the best you can really hope to get out of it. When you get more involved than that, it starts getting problematic.
"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."
"*Guild events or guild role play should be utilized more. Make these mobs come to life, and maybe influence the course of the guild to change. Perhaps influence them to do or–not- do certain things. Though, I must say, this would have to have people involved in going to the guildhalls."
I agree with everything you said except this, because I had characters in 2003-2007 Kinsarmar, and admin really need to not muck around with guilds (or cities) via mobs who ham-handedly tell people what they should or shouldn't be doing.
But other than that, yes. I'd love to see more opportunities for roleplay and a more robustly "apocalyptic" atmosphere.
I'd add that I feel like Antioch in particular has been struggling roleplay-wise since the gods got nuked; Isra and Hastati, while anti-magick and anti-demon, aren't really tied to Antioch the way that the gods were. Obviously the gods were fallible in the end; and yes, magick nuked them so it makes sense to continue down the AM path. But that was months ago now and frankly the organization seems to be drifting without its religious niche.
"*Guild events or guild role play should be utilized more. Make these mobs come to life, and maybe influence the course of the guild to change. Perhaps influence them to do or–not- do certain things. Though, I must say, this would have to have people involved in going to the guildhalls."
I agree with everything you said except this, because I had characters in 2003-2007 Kinsarmar, and admin really need to not muck around with guilds (or cities) via mobs who ham-handedly tell people what they should or shouldn't be doing.
But other than that, yes. I'd love to see more opportunities for roleplay and a more robustly "apocalyptic" atmosphere.
I'd add that I feel like Antioch in particular has been struggling roleplay-wise since the gods got nuked; Isra and Hastati, while anti-magick and anti-demon, aren't really tied to Antioch the way that the gods were. Obviously the gods were fallible in the end; and yes, magick nuked them so it makes sense to continue down the AM path. But that was months ago now and frankly the organization seems to be drifting without its religious niche.
The more I think about your statement, the more I find I agree. Instead of guild mobs being influential, they could probably dig up some guild past that hasn't really been recorded or discovered ect. But guild mobs are pretty much useless unless you have to do some serious relearning.
I have observed Antioch's drifting in RP from afar, with the 'Holy City,' no longer having its Immortals it seems like it needs a new direction. The flavor both Isra and Hastati bring is good, but again, just different from the divine touch of the past.
Kanthari and I have been kicking this between ourselves for a while, so I'll just post it here. Ideally we would like to see guild mobs go the way of familiars in a sense - the GM and secretaries invested with the power can possess them and initiate roleplay. There's pros and cons to the idea, but at least it would make the mobs feel a little more useful and alive.
I like that, but I dislike the idea of people just being able to grab org mobiles and such and use them as mouthpieces. I mean, can you picture Dias the Shah just grabbing Bina to support all his decisions? Things like that?
It also removes any consistent characterization from them at all. There's not that much of it to begin with, granted, but the difference between, say, Selthis running the Noctu tutor and Luthyr running the Noctu tutor would be huge, and both of them could easily have the power to do so.
"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 like that, but I dislike the idea of people just being able to grab org mobiles and such and use them as mouthpieces. I mean, can you picture Dias the Shah just grabbing Bina to support all his decisions? Things like that?
It also removes any consistent characterization from them at all. There's not that much of it to begin with, granted, but the difference between, say, Selthis running the Noctu tutor and Luthyr running the Noctu tutor would be huge, and both of them could easily have the power to do so.
I can definitely see the concern that would cause. You definitely wouldn't want just anyone to control a mob and run off at the mouth about how they should be glitterking of the world (this should be a thing). I still think it would be a neat addition, though perhaps one that would be best gone about in the same manner of Docenting. There would definitely need to be some level of permission/approval in order to pursue the roleplay you wanted through that NPC as well as a means of punishment if you went outside the bounds of what you are allowed to do.
In the interest of being completely honest, we already depend on administration (or presumably) the existing Docents to not roleplay an NPC in a completely uncharacteristic manner, and I'm sure we've all seen this end in varying degrees of success. I think that for as many players that we have who know absolutely nothing about a certain NPC or worse, would do a downright terrible job of interacting as that mob, we have an equal number that would do an amazing job if given the chance to do so and that such a system could inject some much needed roleplay into organizations at a more personal level.
Not a problem with Dpass and Necropolis, but Khous takes way too long to repop after Lakhild is killed. Possibly as a way to limit Lakhild since he's a QHONOURS, possibly as a way to prevent massive gold farming from the crazy turn-ins there.
I know it's intentional in two rooms in Khous and at least one room in Necropolis, but it seems like wave areas get more ridiculous clots than you see in any other area. The first two rooms of Necropolis clot really hard after a few waves, which is bad if you're not paying attention when you path find in. The two last rooms in Khous are also always clotted hard, but if you clear them in an early round, two rooms at the entrance of the cave system will clot really hard to make up for it.
We had a couple of problems with Khous, which is why the reset is so long. Lakhild is not easy to kill. So we wanted to make sure he would sit there for a while after players got him to appear. Right now it is 5 hours, which is probably too long. We will come up with a way to improve this, as we will be adding in more bossmobs, and waiting longer then 30 to 60 minutes to reset an area is too long.
I have seen those clot and I hate them. I think we know the problem there, and we will fix that in the next couple of days.
@zarim I spent the day looking at how much xp is given out on quests. I am making sure the new quests that will be coming out will be much improved in that sense, especially the one time quests.
@ahkan That is a cool idea for an area. Just increasingly make the waves harder and harder and harder forever. Well, until noone can defeat them anymore. I will keep that in mind for some of the next areas we redo.
I know I'm on the far end of the bell curve here, but Lakhild really isn't all that hard.
What made the demons and the Lich into raid-wipers were the special mechanics. Getting blocked, getting charmed, getting grabbed. Handling them required multiple people and some coordination between the group and made for some fairly big 'oh crap' moments.
Lakhild just hits kind of hard, and if you've got even 2 tanky people, it's fairly easy to just aggro-swap back and forth until he dies.
"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."
@aleutia Yeah, I like the idea of little instances that pop up for some quick bashing. Of course, there are problems with doing this permanently, which have been brought up a bit in this thread. How people (friends and foes) deal with people in those instances are the biggest ones for us.
@lindsey Some of your stuff was not about questing/bashing. Not that it was not good stuff, but I do not want to derail this thread too much so I will just talk about the stuff you brought up.
Old Temples: We are going to be doing some of this soon. Very soon.
Old NPCs: I agree they need to be around the game more. Not sure why this has not been happening, but I will try to make it happen more.
More Events: We actually do events as much as possible, the one we are starting in the next week or so has been in the works for several weeks.
Area Events: I saw a couple people post on that and I think they were all pretty on with what I would say. New areas and skills have to have pretty linear releases.
@khizan Right, that area was more of a mid range test. Good to know that though. I feel like we need more mob running around in there all the time though, so we will probably increase the spawn rate.
Honestly, I've solo'd Lakhild without runes/favours/artifacts as a Strong pre-aspect Hunter. Since he doesn't follow or, IIRC, do any more hindering than just proning and maybe leg breaks, he's easy to handle if you just walk out of the room when you're running low on health. Hardest part of Khous for me was clearing the clots that pop up in his room and the room before his. but as long as you've got a quick attack speed, they're usually cheesable. I'd assumed that the slow reset time was so a whole group of people couldn't grab the qhonours from Lakhild in a short period of time, and because the turn-ins are nice. Pretty sure I read in an Announce at some point that the area will drop back to a previous wave after so long. Does that not happen, or is it on a really slow timer?
I really like the interface for the new Transk. Far more approachable.
With that said, what level is it intended for? Khizan is at quest level zero, so I took this chance to go do all the quests I could find with a casual glance, to see what I'd get out of it. I killed the beast, I set the bomb, I flowered the well, and I tuned in an orc scout.
This is what I got: Quest Level : 1 (24%) Newborn
3% of that is from the horde turn-in, of which I only did one, and it's repeatable. Aside from the turn-ins, the exp seems to be extremely meager. This is a kind of sad amount of exp even in the newbie levels, and this area comes after them in the progression.
EDIT: Found another: Helped Ruben. New total: Quest Level : 1 (36%) Newborn
"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."
Okay, so I have significantly increased the amount of quest xp this area gives out for completing the quests and turning in the mobs Sinnika wants. It is in line more with someone that is in that level 20-40 range. If you guys want to test it out and give me some feedback on the numbers that would be great.
So we had a problem in DP where the mobs were spawning in a room you could not get to. That is fixed so the area should be bashable again. Sorry about that.
Comments
From what I remember that worked pretty darn well - people were getting ganked for being out with pk reasons saddled on them, and everyone else just bashed.
I thoroughly liked that bashing event - mostly because I ground out some amazing experience before we had achievements put in place and I was in my lower nineties.
*I know that we have most of the old Temples closed. Can we reverse this and make them ruins? Something that has a little bit more atmosphere than getting kicked from the area (like the Temple of Shallah). Old mobs from the Gods could provide a brief education that the HELP SCROLLS don’t have anymore. We have our library books and old trinkets in memento, but I think opening up this area could add in some quests even. Or at least a richer environment for Imperian and this huge event you guys pulled off. And hey, people might roleplay within ruined temples. OR there could be PK in there. Who knows?
*Memorable figures within events that don’t just die and disappear, they should get placed somewhere. Perhaps even becoming quest mobs which open up a network of little quests that could be done or even tangents off of these plots. I remember in one event a while ago, where the Blue Temple collapsed. There was an awesome ending to that. But where is that angry Kvand spirit? Not in Dis. He could be used to great effect down there if someone had some ideas, ripe with quest sadism.
*Imperian is advertised as an apocalyptic type sort of deal, in my mind. Moons shatter, Immortals go poof. We need more events that slowly build on the desperation of the world, or at least issue subtle reminders that we have some big issues going on internally that could fuel more roleplay. We have shardfalls, that’s neat for pk. But for those of us who like to write a wall of text (cough cough) once and a while, I’d like to see some general emotes other than those regarding the stars, volcanoes, and suns. And the ones we already have should be modified to fit the mood of the world, which is now much –darker-. Don’t have anyone who wants to do it? I’ll happily volunteer to work with someone on it. Seriously.
*Make way for building new areas. Hold an event. Make something happen. Khous just appeared, like BAM. Maybe next time some mobs can travel to a city and ask for help? It’d be more complex for sure, but I like it when areas are discovered the old fashioned way.
*Guild events or guild role play should be utilized more. Make these mobs come to life, and maybe influence the course of the guild to change. Perhaps influence them to do or–not- do certain things. Though, I must say, this would have to have people involved in going to the guildhalls.
*Aspect roleplay perks? Maybe introduce levels to a (poor man’s) Phantasmal Diadem. Instead of having it an artifact only sold at auction. You could buy a lvl 1 in aspect perks for x amount of gold or points, and so on. Perhaps it would limit on the characters of exit and enter, or maybe work like an ambience orb personalized to the character. I would really enjoy something like this. And I’d bash up to whatever level in order to get it. I don’t know about other people. We have the staff of illusion, the death sight token and probably other things I can think of, but I want something that gives me more freedom than having to dish out money that I (as a poor college student) will never have.
I mean, the Aspect Powers are fairly utilitarian and useful. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to change any of those up. I’m just enthusiastic about making this game even more customizable.*You know those animal companions in our professions? Well, like in AB Beastmastery, give the other people the ability to <animal/seraph/elemental/> emote. I know tons of people who’d appreciate this. Pretty please? I know the physical appearance of the please doesn’t help much. But I would really love it if it did.
*Different token familiars. We have all seen the familiars in token wares. Maybe switch those out? They’ve been in circulation for maybe a year; it could be good to change them. More moola for you, makes you happier.
--That's all I can really think of for now. Thanks!
This is always iffy, and the backlash can easily make this kind of thing not worth the effort. Volunteers put a lot of time and effort into those events, and, historically, the general response from the community starts at "meh" and it only goes downhill from there.
This is for several reasons, but the main one is that an event designed to release <thing> has no player agency; the outcome of the event is pre-determined and the players cannot affect it. It's not like they're going to create and beta-test new skills/areas/etc and then throw them away because the handful of people involved in the event didn't like how the event went and decided they wanted to work against it.
And so the event ends up being on rails, and the rails are really hard to hide. This means that, in most cases, you never get the feeling that you were involved. You were just along for the ride. This generates a lot of frustration and bad feelings from the people who got really involved in the event only to find out that their contribution to the vent was approximately frak-all nothing, since the ending was already predetermined.
If you look over all the events of this type, you will see very very few that had much positive feedback at all, and a whole lot of feedback that basically consists of "If there was absolutely nothing I could do to affect this, why did you even make it look like my contribution was meaningful?"
You mentioned Khous in your post, and it got a little mini-event and an events post. That's about the best you can really hope to get out of it. When you get more involved than that, it starts getting problematic.
"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."
The more I think about your statement, the more I find I agree. Instead of guild mobs being influential, they could probably dig up some guild past that hasn't really been recorded or discovered ect. But guild mobs are pretty much useless unless you have to do some serious relearning.
I have observed Antioch's drifting in RP from afar, with the 'Holy City,' no longer having its Immortals it seems like it needs a new direction. The flavor both Isra and Hastati bring is good, but again, just different from the divine touch of the past.
I like that, but I dislike the idea of people just being able to grab org mobiles and such and use them as mouthpieces. I mean, can you picture Dias the Shah just grabbing Bina to support all his decisions? Things like that?
It also removes any consistent characterization from them at all. There's not that much of it to begin with, granted, but the difference between, say, Selthis running the Noctu tutor and Luthyr running the Noctu tutor would be huge, and both of them could easily have the power to do so.
"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."
In the interest of being completely honest, we already depend on administration (or presumably) the existing Docents to not roleplay an NPC in a completely uncharacteristic manner, and I'm sure we've all seen this end in varying degrees of success. I think that for as many players that we have who know absolutely nothing about a certain NPC or worse, would do a downright terrible job of interacting as that mob, we have an equal number that would do an amazing job if given the chance to do so and that such a system could inject some much needed roleplay into organizations at a more personal level.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
"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 really like the interface for the new Transk. Far more approachable.
With that said, what level is it intended for? Khizan is at quest level zero, so I took this chance to go do all the quests I could find with a casual glance, to see what I'd get out of it. I killed the beast, I set the bomb, I flowered the well, and I tuned in an orc scout.
This is what I got: Quest Level : 1 (24%) Newborn
3% of that is from the horde turn-in, of which I only did one, and it's repeatable. Aside from the turn-ins, the exp seems to be extremely meager. This is a kind of sad amount of exp even in the newbie levels, and this area comes after them in the progression.
EDIT: Found another: Helped Ruben. New total: Quest Level : 1 (36%) Newborn
"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."