Improving Imperian: Combat and Consequences
This discussion was created from comments split from: Improving Imperian.
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- I'm not around much lately because IRE games and the lack of consequences bother me
- I'm playing a permadeath MUD instead, where if I do something stupid I might DIE and have hours/days/weeks of investment ripped away from me
Maybe not every "hard core" guy will want permadeath, but these are players who feel they can come out on top most of the time. Because frankly, you don't feel this way unless you think you can come out close to the top.
And I will be honest. I probably don't like this guy. Well, there's a chance that I like this guy well enough if I meet him in a game where he can't just eat me alive. But he doesn't like that game, exactly because he doesn't get to eat me alive. Of course, it seems like super hard core games end up literally devouring their own player base sooner or later, because that's just where that goes. Well, that, or you just push most players completely out of pvp, if there is a "no pvp" option.
I am willing to admit these tend to be useful people, which is why I bring this up. Often very technically proficient. They can probably code very, very well. They understand the game mechanics better than all but a few. They are willing and able to get out there and cause trouble (and we need that sometimes).
Although, I go back and forth on whether they are useful enough that we should be worried about losing them or trying to attract them. Interestingly, they usually aren't the tippy top tier, but they're usually sort of close to it. I just don't know if there is a way to give them enough of what they want without literally taking it out of the hide of people like me (which is what they generally want), or whether people like me would end up glad they stuck around. Part of me says we might, because they generally have the wherewithal to generate conflict. Then again, they also sometimes tend to have almost zero patience for people who aren't as good as they are, and that can be really rattling for people like me. But, I do have this hunch that you need -some- of these players. Maybe.
But, there is a contingent of players who very much want some form of actual risk. They do not like this trend towards less actual risk. They also happen to be players who can be useful. You might want some around (though I don't think you want a LOT of them). So basically, could there be a way to make ourselves more attractive to these players without making people like me miserable? I mean, I think it would have to be some kind of niche within our game that provides an outlet for a "hard core" guy - at least occasionally. And that guy wants to play zero sum.
So the short answer is "we aren't against the idea, but nothing we've tried has really landed." We're open to ideas, though. If you have any that you want to float, you're absolutely encouraged to bring them to us through whatever means you feel comfortable. You can always post them to the forums, send them via in-game or forum message, or email them to one or many of us in the administration.
If you prefer email, HELP CONTACTS is a good place to start.
The degree to which $ allows you to mitigate the vast majority of risk in Imperian just makes it even worse. The entire point of one of the most common expensive purchases I see is to escape from risky situations(resetting 1v1 fights if you think you have a chance of losing, escaping from team-fights when things get hairy, etc).
Right now there is absolutely NO way for any sort of significant inter-organizational conflict, and that's made everything sort of toothless. Demonic and Magick teaming up against you? Guess what you can do about it? Absolutely nothing. There is no way whatsoever to inflict consequences on an enemy organization. You can't reasonably attack their trade. You can't attack their guards. You can't attack their resources. All you can really do is take an Obelisk and hope that they care about it, and they'll probably just take it back later when nobody else is around anyways.
You don't provide enough reasons for conflict, and you don't really provide the tools for us to generate our own conflict. Because of this, the game is getting stale again. Just look at the deathsight logs from the past few days.
"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 tricky part is that there are players who don't feel they can win unless someone else -really- loses. I don't like this attitude, by the way, but a lot of these players are otherwise very useful - I really do get the feeling that a lot of players who would normally round out an upper mid tier feel this way.
Now, as a caveat to "consequences are always bad", I do think there sometimes needs to be room for the ability to apply actual leverage to a situation, but that is a bit different - Khizan pretty much addressed it while I was drafting this.
There are some high caliber players who mostly don't need to cause actual damage to another player to feel like they won, but they honestly seem relatively rare in general. To their credit, a lot of our existing top PK-ers seem okay with "just" winning, or they probably wouldn't still be here. But I think our norm might be an exception. So it almost becomes "if you want a decent amount of conflict, you might want to try to find a way to throw this kind of player a bone (but please do it without making Jules and Baasche super sad)".
That complaint is essentially this: "I just killed this guy, and he's still talking smack"
Now for most sane people, even though death doesn't have "real" consequences, if someone just owned the hell out of me, I am not going to be saying much of -anything- to them. In fact, I think one of the first things we figure out is to just not talk to someone who might kick your ass period, much less talk anything that could be construed as smack - unless you really want them to kill you again. Even then, it's not a good idea unless you have enough rapport with that person on an OOC level. It can be a bit trickier for people to realize that this can definitely include "banter", and I remember watching a guy go through that. You could say it potentially shuts down RP, and in some ways it probably does, but it is what it is. If you're smart, you don't talk to people who can kill you unless you sort of know each other and are pretty sure they won't "take it wrong".
But some people don't get it, apparently. So my thought was this: allow someone who kills another player to remove that player's ability to shout for a reasonable period of time (perhaps an hour, but not set on that number) AND broadcast a worldwide message when that happens. If the player already used their shouts, it tacks on.
I do think it would have to be a blanket sort of thing that generally can't be issued for, regardless of whether the killer had a "good" reason, and it is inevitably going to cause some consternation to some people (which is the point), but it gives the stronger combatants a way to sort of flout their dominance by cutting straight to something that really matters, and yet, also doesn't - pride.
I considered adding SAYS for a short period (like say half an hour) as well, but not sure how I feel about that.
Personally, if someone owned me in combat and it wasn't someone I hate, I'd probably laugh it off with them. As I did countless times in the past with Septus / Khizan / Iluv etc. Was hard to even get mad, when reave was doing 90% of my health in one combo pre-nerf.
As for the shit talking, I mean, I sort of picked up on this as a newb, but we had whole conversations about how that works on ring, more than once. Unless you want to get stomped (again), tread carefully. Part of it is that some people will even actively try to bait you into more kills sometimes. So if you're not up for it, it's up to YOU to not take that bait. If you ARE up for it, again, rapport still important.
But this is really about trying to address the frustration that many combatants seem to feel when they kill someone and the person is intent on continuing to pretend to be a badass. My personal take on it is to pretend they're a bit nuts, but that is clearly not all that satisfying to people.
EDIT: just in case it wasn't totally clear, this is an optional thing a successful killer can do to someone if that person has irked them. It won't happen by default.