Mercenary System

Sarrius

@Jeremy @Garryn @Jesse

I like the potential with this mercenary system. I like a lot of it. I love how quick we've been fixing little bugs. It is actually a really neat thing to do between shardfalls and such. It is almost like an Imperian Pokemon, mixed with a bit of a non-combat DnD experience. There's some planning put in to your team, some possibilities for expansion, and a lot of really cool ways to play with the toys we have been given. My hat goes off to everybody involved in this project, because it looks like something really fun to play around with. I have only one complaint so far, and it is this:

In some high level adventures, failure can even be fatal to one or more of your mercenaries.

There is a difference in wording here - incapacitated vs. fatal. I do not like the idea of my investment of time, lessons, and etc being taken away from me at high levels of investment in this system. I have yet to reach that point (none of us have), but I am floating this concern now rather than later when a few of us lose one of our beloved mercenary buddies.

How is everybody else doing with the system? Any complaints? Ideas for improvement?

Khizan

I don't have enough lessons on me to really train a group, so it will wait on the elite trickle; I am not converting credits for this without seeing how it works beforehand.

Jesse

Sorry, we actually removed the fatal events a while back, and I forgot to edit the helpfile.

At this time, we're moving forward with the idea that mercenaries are permanent. They cannot die, and their contracts do not expire.

Sarrius

Jesse said:

Sorry, we actually removed the fatal events a while back, and I forgot to edit the helpfile.

At this time, we're moving forward with the idea that mercenaries are permanent. They cannot die, and their contracts do not expire.

So the only reason I'd replace one, then, is if I found one of a higher rating or other quality?

Yurii

Looked cool. Wanted to participate. Sucks that lessons and gold are necessary for this. Unlike most of Demonic, I'm not sitting on omni-trans all professions for my circle, plus thousands of extra lessons sitting around. To find out that this cool thing, that could potentially be awesome costs things that I would rather save for new professions is shitty. Can't participate because I'm not elite. Awesomesauce.

-1 to entire system

Sarrius

I spent 10 credits to buy in to the system and build a team, to put costs in perspective.

Jesse

Sarrius said:

So the only reason I'd replace one, then, is if I found one of a higher rating or other quality?

Correct.

Aleutia

My one complaint thus far is I find the word mercenary incredibly hard to type fast #fwp

I like the system overall so far, but I've also barely touched it. I sent out a group of two for shits and giggles on an 8hr adventure, so we'll see what happens.

I do have a question though - when you do MERCENARY LIST FOR HIRE, what is their rating exactly? I've see a few that were rated 3, but their stats were pretty crappy, and I've seen ones that were rated 1, but their stats were significantly better than someone rated 3.

Jesse

You can use MERC instead of MERCENARY for all of the commands.

The rating is considered to be a mercenary's potential. It mainly affects how many rating points the mercenary will gain as he/she levels up. 1 mercenary rating gives roughly 11 more points at level 100.

From the first line of HELP MERCENARY STATS

Rating
 - All mercenaries are assigned a rating during their initial training by the Mercenaries Union. A mercenary with a higher rating is considered to have a higher potential strength than a lower rated mercenary, allowing them access to more powerful abilities and equipment as they grow stronger.

Sarrius

The rating system is not very intuitive, but supposedly it shows their capacity for improvement or using better tools/skills, apparently?

In regards to amount of mercenary parties - where is the artifact that expands your group capacity? Is that a trashed idea too?

Jesse

Do ARTIFACT LIST GROUP

Jeremy Saunders

As you can all tell, this is a completely new type of game/system, unique to anything in any IRE game. It took much longer to finish then we wanted, but we are pretty happy with the current product. It was a huge undertaking and is literally a giant 'game within the game'.

That being said, we are very open to ways to improve on it. Please feel free to let us know.

We have only released a single beginner adventure but we have more ready to go once the initial bugs are worked out. We will also release ways for you to battle groups against each other and release a tournament system. We have plans for more skills, equipment, rewards, and so on. 

We have tried to make this a fun thing for people to do on the side. No one should feel like the 'have' to do it, but it should offer fun and possible profit to people who want to pursue it. 

With the main release done we will be adding more and unlocking the additional features over the next few weeks. I can also have Jesse get a few of our outstanding projects finished for your enjoyment. I am going to make a post in a couple of days giving a run down of everything we are working on and what to expect over the next month, so watch for that.

Aleutia

There's a lot of info, and I haven't seen this listed anywhere yet, but I could have missed it:

Can you trade your hired mercenaries with other people?

Jesse

No, you cannot currently trade mercenaries with other people. Currently, you can only trade unused guidebooks and mercenary equipment.

We're still talking/thinking about whether we'll add mercenary trading, and what kind of restrictions we'd have to place on it. For example, we wouldn't want a group of people trading around a level 100 5-star mercenary with +25 on all her stats. So for now, no mercenary trading.

Khizan

I have a few complaints, mostly about syntax and setup.

1. These commands are so freaking huge. "mercenary ab skillname show". Why can't this be "mab skillname", like the alias I just set up for it clientside?
2. When I do "mercenary group groupname show" I get a bunch of names in positions. Please show me the numbers too, since I have to use them to refer to them. 
3. When I do mercenary list, I get a group associated with the merc. Please give me the position with the group, as well.
4. First, I buy a kit. Then, I MERC EQUIP KIT#### UNPACK. Then I MERC EQUIP LIST. Then, I MERC EQUIP #### SHOW to see what it does. Then I MERC EQUIP ### ASSIGN ### to use it, but I probably had to do MERC GROUP NAME SHOW to find the name of the guy I want to hold it and then a MERC LIST to get that guy's id. This is really goddamn frustrating. It is clunky as hell and I hate it and this alone makes me want to ragequit your system. Please do something about this.

Sarrius

I would make it much like familiar trading operates - you can move a mercenary between players exactly once.

Jeremy Saunders

@Khizan I agree 100%. We will be smoothing out syntax. We are open to suggestions there. Once you get past the learning curve and get the initial group set up, it is much easier, but yeah, that is still a lot.

On the topic of the learning curve, anything you feel would help with that would be appreciated as well. Especially as you are all in the process of learning it. I think we will be putting in a step by step guide for setting up your first group, but we would like more ideas.

Jesse

@Khizan

1. Good call.

2. You shouldn't need to use the numbers to refer to mercenaries. Name should be viable for all of the commands that require a mercenary.

3. Good call.

4. The whole MERC command structure uses a lot of MXP links. Turn MXP on, then type MERC. Everything you see there should be clickable, and will send "?" in the place of parameters. You will then get clickable contextually relevant lists of the mercs, groups, equipment, etc that you can interact with for that command. Ideally, anything you want to do with mercs should be doable with just a few clicks. If you have any other ideas for improving the clunky syntax, I'm all ears.

Sarrius

The documentation needs to be cleaned up and pruned some, for sure. I will go over it and post what I think is really not helpful.

If it isn't already noted in the abilities subsection file, there is actually no limit to the number of skills a mercenary can learn in each category. While tools restrict adventure skill usage somewhat, you can teach your highest statistic mercenaries your non-tool adventure skills. Before I knew this, I was carefully picking which mercenary had which skill so as many bases were covered as possible.

Aleutia

In regards to the WARES, I'm not sure how you would implement them. Maybe just a help list? It would be really nice to see the basic stat buffs/debuffs whatever when I buy an item.

For instance, I have no idea that a grimy tin necklace is:

Mercenary Equipment Info For Equipment #301
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Stats:
  Strength: -2
  Intelligence: 1
  Dexterity: -2
 
I can't tell this without buying it first. This wouldn't be an issue on equipment and stuff generated from doing adventures, but I should know the stats of the stuff I'm buying beforehand. Maybe I'm just missing how you view it otherwise while still in the shop?

Jeremy Saunders

@sarrius That would be appreciated.

Jesse

@Aleutia

I see what you're saying there, but one of the things we're trying here is a system which encourages experimentation and experience. That's why the initial equipment is so cheap. We think it could be kind of fun to learn your way through a new aspect of the game, by collecting various pieces of equipment and abilities and comparing them. You never know what kind of new ability or piece of equipment might be on the horizon, but experience will help you realize that scimitars generally have less damage but more speed than swords.

We also thought it could add to some fun community interactions, like orghelp files, word-of-mouth, and the wiki. All merc equipment is standardized, so a battered bronze sword will have the same stats as every other battered bronze sword.

We'll be seeing how things go, but that's where our thought progress is right now. Try playing around with things, experimenting, and letting your knowledge of merc stuff grow organically, both personally and as a community.

Khizan

Can I please get at least a partial lesson refund when I have to have a mercenary forget a skill?  Also, can forget forget a skill rank by rank? When I accidentally learned a skill up to L4 instead of L3, my only choice was to forget the entire skill for absolutely no refund and buy back up to level 3, which is sort of bullshit.

@Jesse : Remembering and typing "Nelwynneth Galerender" is actually more work than just doing a list and matching the name to the number.

Yurii

Can we catch mercenaries in the wild? I'd prefer it if they were found at random in long grass. Also, in order to catch them, you obviously have to weaken them a little bit, then you would follow up by throwing some kind of contraption at them, which in turn captures them as your own.

Jesse

@Khizan

Even if you don't have MXP enabled, you can still use the "?" functionality to help yourself out. Try MERC EQ ? ASSIGN ? to see an example of the context-specific lists you can see. Still a lot of commands and typing, but probably better than doing MERC GROUP NAME SHOW followed by MERC LIST to get a mercenary's numeric ID.

Khizan

This system feels so goddamn slow.

I spent a ton of time fitting out my mercenaries, training them up, a ton of lessons on skills... and then I give them an order and I get to check back in 8 hours? And I might have to do this multiple times before realizing I lost? It's hard to feel enthused about this.

I'd rather be able to run, say, a set amount of adventures in a day but make all the decisions in a short time frame than have to wait like this, especially because this breeds Optimal Timing Bullshit. 

If I send somebody on an 8 hour option at 6pm, I don't get to take another action until 2am. Since most people are sleeping at 2am, they won't get to respond then. So they wait until the next time they can log on. Maybe it's after work. So their 8 hour action has become a 24  hour action and yawn this is not very exciting or interesting.

It also feels kind of scummy in a farmville way. Got to check in to harvest my blah blah blah and so forth.

Jesse

The 8-hour option is supposed to be the easiest, slowest option. Your adventure should also have had some shorter actions that would be slightly more difficult.

The 10-minute option might be harder, but that's offset by the fact that you can spam a lot of them in the same amount of time it would take to run an 8-hour option.

Nothing's forcing you to choose to wait 8 hours, but it might be useful if you're going to bed or going to work and want to have a higher chance of progressing the adventure while you're away.

Jeremy Saunders

@khizan We will discuss some options for that. I can see the annoyance, but the issue is also if you can just do it as many times as you want, then obviously the rewards come too fast. I suppose another option would be to let you run the adventure quickly, but then have a cool down before those adventurers can go again, based on the decisions made in the adventure.

We will have to debate this some.

Iniar

Sounds fun! Only thing I would caution is to consider true permanency carefully - see obelisks, artifacts, shops, etc. It may plateau and interest can fall away quickly.

Aleutia

If anyone wants to help fill this out and convert it to your own org files, go ahead:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oUGEKgVlPvCiNd3QgzndZwLi862PJtlWGodrPVuDtGA/edit#gid=0

We're collecting basic information. Feel free to change formatting around/colours/whatever to make it easiest to read.

Khizan

Jeremy said:

@khizan We will discuss some options for that. I can see the annoyance, but the issue is also if you can just do it as many times as you want, then obviously the rewards come too fast. I suppose another option would be to let you run the adventure quickly, but then have a cool down before those adventurers can go again, based on the decisions made in the adventure.

We will have to debate this some.

  I'd much rather be restricted to running a certain amount of adventures per day or something, instead of making my choice and then waiting forever. This is a brand new system, you just brought it out, everybody's excited about it, and so it really really sucks that so far I have gotten to make two choices in an adventure so far ad that it could theoretically take me a week to run an entire one.