Split discussion: Housing Protection Addon

Eoghan

This discussion was created from comments split from: Improving Imperian.

Arakis

The Protection perk for houses is awesome (and reminiscent of Achaea) it would be nice if the same perk could be added to shop stockrooms for those of us that spend 90% of our lives idling in our shops.

Eoghan

It's still experimental. We may modify it somehow, remove it, or expand access to it - time will tell.

Mercer

at 500k per room, it will be expensive to completely protect even the smallest house


I think if possible it should work for the whole house, instead of by room

Eoghan

It is deliberately expensive. It represents a significant impact on conflict, and shouldn't be easy to come by.

Khizan

I don't have a problem with the protection effect in cities, because if somebody really wants to hide in their city, I don't see much harm in that.

I don't like the idea of allowing it into non-city houses, though, because it's too easy to turn a house in, say, the Western Celidon or the Bardosi into a tower.

Kabaal

Make it indoors only out of city?

Juran

Khizan said:

I don't have a problem with the protection effect in cities, because if somebody really wants to hide in their city, I don't see much harm in that.

I don't like the idea of allowing it into non-city houses, though, because it's too easy to turn a house in, say, the Western Celidon or the Bardosi into a tower.

If you're going to allow that in cities, I don't see a super big disadvantage to allowing it out of cities. If a house is abused as an impenetrable base for ranged attacks or something, there's fun to be had sieging it later. Housing outside of cities does not grant the same defenders bonus that houses inside cities are given.

Khizan

You can't travel to me in that room, you can't summon me out of that room, and you can't get past a locked door. You're going to siege me how, exactly? You could start a radiance on me, I guess, and make me break the area, but other than that there's nothing meaningful that you can do against me.

Juran

Khizan said:

You can't travel to me in that room, you can't summon me out of that room, and you can't get past a locked door. You're going to siege me how, exactly? You could start a radiance on me, I guess, and make me break the area, but other than that there's nothing meaningful that you can do against me.

Sooo.. I don't see the problem.

If it's going to be used to dodge combat, it's as big an issue in a locked off house in Kinsarmar as it is in a locked off house in the Reate Forest.

Khizan

Once you're in Kinsarmar, you've effectively dodged combat already; the thing there is that you've removed yourself from both attacking and being attacked.

When you've got a house sitting out in the middle of the Bardosi or the Vardarian or the Western Celidon, you can sit in there and Vader-choke/doppleganger/rootspam people during fights all you want with effectively no risk to yourself. 

Jules

If it's not already happening, it might be worth seeing how this was dealt with in Achaea (i.e. so that it really is just a feature that allows someone to have a tea-party in their home, not something that allows people to be super annoying).  I have no prism in one of my rooms in a subdivision house there, just so I could conceivably invite people over without having to constantly worry about getting a security ding from my city if a guest didn't move fast enough.  Thankfully, Antioch at least, is almost certainly more understanding about such things than Cyrene would be.  

I know monks are one class that can still get past the no prism/no travel defense in houses there (and it's sounding like they might be able to do so here too, which might be a problem if the other circles don't have classes that can do something similar, since they are a factional class here).  

Juran

You're talking about extreme edge cases here. A fight would have to happen to break out in the same area as your immovable house, with availability of sufficient ranged damage classes to justify trying to turtle, in a scenario that would not just allow them to kill you later.

Edit: Allowing it to be placed in a market stall is a much bigger risk, because that truly would allow for a mobile safe room that could be placed in the same area as events and such.

Khizan

Caravans are quite predictable; I didn't pull Bardosi, Western Celidon, or Vardarian out of a hat.

Juran

That situation is probably stronger without the house defense, to be honest. The only ways you're getting into a monolithed, indoor house with a lock on the door are prism and moradeim bypass. Giving up the possibility of using brazier or deliver in exchange for two skills you should be able to stop with movement isn't a fair exchange.

Teravi

500k is perfectly reasonable compared to other house add-on prices. 

I'm all about this. Already got it for my theater, and bashing up the coin for the exhibition hall. 

Edit - Also, gold is stupidly easy to come by in Imperian. It's not that much effort to work your way up to 500k. If I can do it with my absolute hatred of hunting and lack of quest knowledge, anyone can.

Arakis

I doubt anyone would waste 25 tokens just to be able to attack a caravan group on the occasion the caravan generates there. If anything the admins could simply make a rule that people that abuse the addon for one-sided combat will be punished, instead of preemptively punishing anyone who spent $$$ acquiring a token house to begin with. This is a nice perk and one other games have and seem to function perfectly fine with, if anything adding it to guildhalls and shop stockrooms would be nice since people without homes of any kind can't idle safely anywhere really with focus moradeim bypass still functioning perfectly well in major cities and shards being abundant.

Iniar

The knee jerk creation of this system is unnecessary for the frequency of these 'invasions'. In terms of expected utility, you create more of of a long term problem than the situation(s) warrant.

Eoghan

Iniar said:

The knee jerk creation of this system is unnecessary for the frequency of these 'invasions'. In terms of expected utility, you create more of of a long term problem than the situation(s) warrant.

This was not a knee-jerk reaction to current complaints. It is a house addon we have been discussing for many, many months.

Iniar

Good.

Linslet

I don't like it one bit. The idea of creating a totally safe zone to dodge combat isn't something I ever thought I would see in Imperian. It's making the game genuinely more boring.

@Arakis

Actually, dumping 25 tokens (about 500cr) on an impregnable radiance room is almost exactly what I would expect out of Septus. I can't blame him for using everything available but come on, this is a guy who uses sanctuary radiance.

You say people can't idle anywhere without fear of being jumped on, I guess I missed the memo about moradeim bypass disabling guards and seige, could you give me an announce post number on that change?

Teravi

The room is not impregnable. My house is still plenty raidable if people catch me off guard. If people -are- using it to stir up trouble and hide from consequence, I think that's worthy of issue. 

As for AFK idling in safety, people -already do this-. There are plenty of safe spaces to idle. 

Having said that, I see far more prisms to people in houses who are doing absolutely nothing with PK than I do to people who are engaged in it. The problem being resolved is for RPers. 

Turds will be turds and should be dealt with accordingly. 

Jules

I don't understand why top combatants would want to break into a house in a city where someone who probably only dabbles in combat is having a tea party in the first place.  How is that exciting and why would you choose that over caravans/shard falls/obelisks or just jumping the other people who are actually at least somewhat good (compared to your own abilities)?  Imperian actually does have something of an AFK problem even when Ironbeard isn't around (right now, I get it, the system is what it is), and I'd *much* rather those people AFK in a house, to be honest.  

Sarrius

Because it is often the people who waste their money on trivial shit like that who have the greatest talent for pissing 'top combatants' off. Running their mouthes, killing newbies, etc.

Jules

Fair enough!

Jeremy Saunders

Like I said, we will be watching this pretty closely to see what happens over the next couple of months. The reason we took several months debating adding something like this was that I personally hate safe areas.

Houses in wilderness areas are really my main concern. I semi considered making it so that if you have done something aggressive in the past 5 minutes, it would not work for you. However, this would be a major amount of work to add as we do not have any kind of way to track when a player is in combat right now. Adding something like that would be a huge (really, really huge) amount work.

Anyways, we may have to put some kind of restriction on it, we will see.

Teravi

I never said 'top combatants'. Usually the people who harass RPers are mid-tier or lower. The same sort of people who immediately ran to one of my older characters after 2 years of being MIA, who happened to be out of doors gathering herbs (because literally everything had decayed) and got excited they could PK someone with no armor, weapons, healing supplies, or a system. :P

As to why they do it, lulz? Who freaking knows. As I've said, there are LOTS of conflict generators in Imperian. And yet, it still happens.

Khizan

Jeremy said:

However, this would be a major amount of work to add as we do not have any kind of way to track when a player is in combat right now.

  The self-harm setup does something similar to this; you can't attack yourself within a minute of attacking another player. A restriction like that would work, since the main objection is people using the room to hide while attacking.

Iniar

Jules said:

I don't understand why top combatants would want to break into a house in a city where someone who probably only dabbles in combat is having a tea party in the first place.  How is that exciting and why would you choose that over caravans/shard falls/obelisks or just jumping the other people who are actually at least somewhat good (compared to your own abilities)?  Imperian actually does have something of an AFK problem even when Ironbeard isn't around (right now, I get it, the system is what it is), and I'd *much* rather those people AFK in a house, to be honest.  

There are a lot of problems with Imperian.

What appears to be happening is an increasing segregation of the two 'pools' of players - people who predominantly roleplay ("A") and people who predominantly fight ("B"). In and of itself, this isn't a bad thing. However, taking both the age of the game and the size of the player-base ('ecosystem'), the "B" population is no longer sustainable on the merits of fighting and even conflict-generating mechanisms alone.

Take a minute to consider this:

The necessary ingredients for -good- roleplay are: 2 persons good at roleplay.

The necessary ingredients for -good- fights are: 2 persons good at fighting with fairly equivalent investments in time, resources and comparable skillsets.

What does it take to make a tea party:

Teacups.

What does it take to make a basic fighter:

50 - 150 lines of code. 

So innately and through pure work alone, the requisites for a 'good' fight are more 'scarce' (not more 'difficult', Teravi). This leads to an extremely dilute experience - think 5 minutes of entertainment per 3 hours. Accordingly, your "B" population self-selects out and continues to dwindle in size (and therefore, sustainable and meaningful fight-type interactions dwindle)

What happens is an increasingly empowered "A" population by virtue of a non-loss bias. Any minimal 'loss' is weighted more heavily than it deserves because of the visceral experience. Therefore, increasingly, "A" population are given tools to cope, creating further segregation. To put this in perspective, 1 death means as much as 5 deaths to a "B", whereas for an "A", 1 (unwarranted) death is really, really irritating.

In this current situation, the implementation of 'safe' zones are an implementation of unnecessary amplitude for the ascribed problem. The issue system exists for a reason.

Of course the argument goes both ways; no "A" person has ever forced their roleplay on a "B"... right? The mechanical equivalent would be a room that disabled all emotes, custom emotes, and says.

Wysrias

Sorry for the oncoming derail, but there isn't a quick fix, or otherwise, for the core problem: a small playerbase. There's very few players who "do it all" and participate heavily in both combat and roleplay. People get starved for combat and have to resort towards bothering players who otherwise have a lukewarm interest or near non-participation. Players get bored because no number of conflict mechanics matter if the same 5-10 (or 2-5, sorry demonic) players are participating in each faction. Caravans are already dull and present a 'rich get richer' scenario that can basically be opted out of. Shardfalls are okay but horribly contingent on getting sizeable (and competitive!) groups together. I don't think I've seen an arena event the entire month of December. There are flourishing pockets of RP (sorry I've been so terribly absent @Myfanwe!) but I know they're suffering too because, like conflict systems, good roleplay needs participants and perspectives.

Really, the game needs a type of 'Scroll of Resurrection' type promotion where we harass our friends on skype to play so that we get a free month of iron elite or something when they opt back in. I know it's likely everyone's hands are tied on this and I know it's been brought up countless times before by more than me, but I can't think of anything that would have a better chance of stirring interest. Players will feel obligated to act on their investment, maybe they'll get hooked from a good fight or two, maybe they'll start some amazing roleplay arcs that keep them coming back. Maybe both!

Derail aside, adding housing protection will probably not matter at all - we're arguing hypotheticals that rarely pop up, and if they do happen, the administration can keep a close enough eye on the few instances where it occurs. They've already stated their contigency plan here, and we shouldn't pretend that the fallout is going to be anything but players forgetting for the most part for a few months, with a possible isolated instance or two of abuse that will merit a swift response, and probably a forum thread, because that's how we roll. Gold sinks that matter are good, and while I personally don't mind setting up camp in a siege line, that's not everyone's cup of tea.

Jeremy Saunders

Khizan said:

Jeremy said:

However, this would be a major amount of work to add as we do not have any kind of way to track when a player is in combat right now.

  The self-harm setup does something similar to this; you can't attack yourself within a minute of attacking another player. A restriction like that would work, since the main objection is people using the room to hide while attacking.

I will take a look at that option.