Improving Imperian Split: Shifting Focus
This discussion was created from comments split from: Improving Imperian.
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I'd come back and invest heavily if the game resembled something like it used to. How many times and how many people must echo this before it's taken into consideration?
Inb4 @Khizan and the others who helped kill the game come out of the woodwork bashing this post.
Hell, all the way back to Circles if you want. Code enforcing circles was a mistake. The game was much more vibrant without them and it should have been on the playerbase to police transgressions like Khizan being Rumal and doing his Runedancer dealio. BUt hey, I never had a problem with very powerful people running around. It made things more fun. I don't think you can have a system where you have credits and artifacts be as powerful as they need to be without having class and skill combinations that are equally dangerous. Having scary monster people out and about increases the enjoyment of the game.
I'm undoubtedly going to get everything I say pulled apart and/or told how wrong I am and so on and so forth, but you can't argue with one simple fact. The game is an absolute shadow of its former self, the playerbase has been gone for YEARS and the only people still around are the people who helped make it this way, or the people who enjoy this type of thing and never had a chance to enjoy the 'true' Imperian. Wild, dangerous, sometimes unabalanced but -ALWAYS- fun, exciting and full of potential.
The thing that separated IMperian so much from Achaea was the fact it was ROUGH. It was like the wild frontier, unpolished and dangerous whereas Achaea was much more settled and cultivated. It's funny, because Achaea is now much more like Imperian used to be than Imperian itself.
It was my first serious MUD and I will treasure its memory dearly. I invested thousands of dollars into it but the moment I was able to retire my characters out of here I took it, because the game that I enjoyed no longer exists. I understand you care about it Jeremy and I have enormous respect for you, but it was taken in the wrong direction and that's reflected by the numbers.
I think giving the top players the ability to control additional mechanical advantages, or to mechanically punish other players IS almost always bad, and taking the teeth out of that was good.
But you do have to give those top guys SOMETHING - often in the form of prestige or perceived in game badassery, which is what I tried, unsuccessfully to get at in that consequences thread.
EDIT: I especially disagree with the bit about circles. As it is, circle integrity is fairly weak right now, and one of the things Achaea has finally got right, and which is worth trying to copy, is exactly one of the things you think is so bad - Achaea has pretty distinct factions now, and I seriously doubt players can claim much of the credit for that. Just for starters, part (but I am sure not all) of how they fixed a VERY persistent "mushy factions" issue, was literally razing an entire goddamned city and putting it under an ocean.
Both involve a rather chilly admin reaction to players murdering other players who were already open PK during "events". And these were actual bounties as I remember. So in a sense, the "highest" form of open PK between players/orgs. Further, these were often people who rarely left guardstack under normal circumstances.
So they'd come talk to Urzog. Or they'd be at the Love Festival. And someone would murder the hell out of them right there. Which, besides being a unique opportunity to actually get at these people, was probably frankly the most exciting thing to happen during said event.
But in the first case, we got a "secretary" whose clear purpose was to prevent throneroom murder, and in the second, I believe the guy got a good yelling at and there was a sternly worded announce. BORING. And those are just two examples that speak to the overall tone of things.
EDIT: I mean, if someone kills me while I am getting crowned Princess of Love it is basically an awesome opportunity to decorate my crown with blood spatter. And I can come back in a few minutes and claim said crown, having lost no XP or gold. And it is certainly not as though, in this game, I have to deal with "lol, you took part in teh PK, prepare to be hunted all teh time" (which sucks for most people, yes). And do I really even need to comment on Urzog?
The thing that removed the Wild West feeling was actually the introduction of Whyte's Mudbot and the Whytebot healing system that went along with it. It was the first free high quality healing system.
See, lots of people in this game are bad. Most of them, in fact. Their offenses sucked pretty bad, but that was okay because most of the game's defenses sucked pretty bad so they could still manage to kill people. They had C level healing and C level offenses and everything balanced out. Everybody could feel like a badass because everybody could kill people.
That all changed when the Whytebot dropped. Suddenly, everybody had A-level healing. The problem was that 95% of the world still had C-level offenses that were now completely ineffective. Suddenly, most of the world doesn't feel badass anymore. Aconite/ciguatoxin spam isn't a win button. People actually remember to sip mana, so Priests aren't steamrolling. It's still crap against Aeon so Noctusari are still dominating, but almost everybody else sees a dramatic loss of capability and their 1v1 potential drops into the gutter.
That's when the Wild West ended. The day that the Whytebot took away (almost) everybody's guns.
"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."
But what about Jeremy wholesale doing away with XP loss? Seriously. I dug up that thread and was fascinated by it. Because that is something the players would have screamed bloody murder about if anyone but an admin said "I think we're going to do this". And I will probably never be able to thank him enough for doing it (but I do show my love in ridiculous credit purchases).
It is just that things have just swung incredibly far in a "no combat if it's not totally opt-in, ever" direction - which actually has more to do with the equally awesome idea of bounties than it does with limiting tangible loss (well, the idea BEHIND bounties, which is limiting retribution, and really, just limiting "surprise! PK"). Since we don't have tangible loss, most of our ability to feel dangerous and unpredictable might have to come from not having everything be totally and completely opt-in - to the point that I can say "oh, this is a fancy event, I don't have to worry about someone lopping off my head for that obelisk attack here".
Gutting Metrazol and stuff? Meh. Bad decision. imo.
If you think Whytes killed the 'Wild west' feeling I shudder to think about Garrynbot. Whytes was so imperfect. I remember being a Malignist and smashing any whytebot I came across easily. They couldn't keep up with it.
Whytebot was one of the best things to happen to the game because it allowed people access to combat, but if you wanted to be amazing you had to modify it. Stock whytes just didn't cut it at the Lower Upper through Medium/Upper Upper tiers of combat. But it GOT PEOPLE OUT THERE.
BUt like I said, there were things that allowed BAD people to kill other people using whytes. Old IDras toxins as I said. Old skills that are gone or modified now.
Septus said "the only thing stopping someone from being a power house is them" and that's true with anything, but very out of context. It's simply not as easy to be successful anymore.
All this is aside from the fact that thegame is so group focused now it's ridiculous. THat's my beef. You yourself have been one of the greatest advocates for this, because you had your time as king of the hill and want a different kind of combat. 1v1 bores you. I know the reasons why, as youv'e stated them. But I don't feel that the entire game should have been changed to accomodate you and a particular group of people. Certainly not at the expense of the game.
EDIT: And @Jules, you are a very smart person and from what I've read of your posts I have respect for you, but I believe I'm correct when I say that you are a 'newer' player of Imperian and weren't around for the early/mid days that we're mentioning, so I understand why you would disagree with a lot of what I'm saying. You never got to experience Imperian without circles.
And don't get me started on remvoing death penalty. What's the point of even dying? Why not just be knoicked unconscious or something else equally silly.
We do now have Plagues, but they are sort of broken... and when it really comes down to it, they can be quite group oriented. Which is good if you are basically supporting someone like Septus (and he's still going to get his 1 v. 1 in a lot of times). I like it less if say someone like ME decided I was going to have a boneyard, and got a lot of AM to support me, because it is clearly intended to be one of the ultimate "individual" prestige badges in the game.
Some of the rest of the stuff... the point is, I got my ass beat. You won. If you take my XP too, I will just be honest. The heat in that kitchen is going to get too hot, real quick.
The universal curing has widely been a good thing, overall. Class design took too long to catch up with it, but now we're starting to see classes that are strong and interesting that don't have a heavy coding burden on their offense and people like Robynn are able to be legitimate competitive fighters despite poor coding skills.
"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."
Yes, it could be frustrating prior to that. The 80-90 grind was hell, and getting reset from 87 to 85 because you were engaged in a big raid defense or some equally important combat scenario was heartbreaking.
But that was a GOOD thing. Why? Three reasons.
First, because it made the achievement of Aspect so much more satisfying.
Second, it provided a goal for everyone to achieve that really did mean something.
Third, some things SHOULD be hard. They SHOULD be frustrating and they SHOULD sometimes make people question themselves. It promotes personal growth and adds a ton of value to something.
What's the point of being able to level up at all if you don't lose xp upon death? Yaaaay more health... I guess?
Edit: @Khizan I agree that universal curing was a good thing. When it was stock whytes and available to everyone. Serverside Garrynbot took it too far. Whytes was enough of a benchmark to balance around. It was also the time of greatest population in the game except for right at the very beginning. I just can't unsee a direct correlation from the game design that came after and the plummet of the playerbase.
You might be right that now Garrynbot is out that class development has caught up and you're starting to see classes that are strong and unique enough that it may make a difference. But it's going to take a hell of a lot of work to get things to where they need to be in my opinion.
One benefit is that the game is balanced around Aspect as a population norm - instead of balancing around the (as you noted) oh so tenuous level 80, and having the already better, stronger players be even bigger outliers. Because they are the ones who can most easily achieve and maintain Aspect.
In an XP loss world, you eventually "nerf" Aspect (as Dragon was nerfed), at least to a point, because you at least murkily understand that you've been giving your best, strongest players, who were already going to win most fights, the ability to procure an even bigger advantage. Some "non-coms" will get Aspect sure, and help out in the occasional fight, maybe. But mostly the people who have Aspect (certainly the ones who matter in a conversation about PK) are going to be the best PK-ers - and non-coms who avoid the hell out of combat most days.
So you nerf aspect a bit, but in practice the bigger health pool from all those levels is still honestly a pretty big deal. So really, "Yaaay more health" is more a feature of the XP loss world. That is essentially what it boils down to. "Yaayyy, that player I could ALREADY beat handily now has less health, too, because that's what you get for losing, or something". The most ridiculously strong players are going to be the ones who are skilled AND artied - which is a fundamental concept of our games every player hopefully accepts, but now their advantage is even more extreme.
And then there is the standoff/chill effect. I mean, it is the most backwards thing. In the real world, race handicapping is meant to make an otherwise boring race that wouldn't even be worth running, because the result would be a foregone conclusion, potentially interesting. I am not suggesting we handicap the best players in our games, but I am saying that the old school approach of, in essence, handicapping people for LOSING, seems like a hell of a bad way to get anyone who isn't usually winning to keep coming back to the table. You are going to forcibly create a lot more non-coms.
And yeah, I do mean I'd quit. Or, I'd certainly quit most PK, and probably the game soonish after that. I wouldn't really have much of a choice. I'd be hopping mad too, since a lot of my huge financial investment here hinges on not having to worry about tangible losses - just "loss losses".
And those actually are hard enough. At some point you realize that even though you are "only" losing, it still gets fairly hard and disheartening.
EDIT: here is a question. How old were you in these glory days? For one, it might color how you remember them, and part of that might be that, when you DID get "reset from 87 to 85", as you mentioned, the grind sucked, but you were a young person with few real responsibilities (and possibly not quite as fed up with bashing up chars in multiple games over the years).
Also, for your theory that the death penalty has been good for the game? Well, population was tanking before it came in and it continued tanking after. There were five times as many people playing when there were consequences to death than now, so I'm fairly sure my standpoint on it is pretty solid.
If you'd quit over losing some experience altogether, well that makes me question your commitment to it in the first place. Do note that I'm not saying the game would be better off without you playing in it. I'm saying the game would be better if it had consequences for dying and how it motivates people and influences their decisions.
Death no longer influences people in a particular way. Now it's just a quick break before you're back doing whatever it was before. It's part of the reason why villains are less intimidating and evil. When Dregaur could pop out of nowhere and take away 20% of your level because you were foolish enough to get caught by him, it improved your awareness of your surroundings (if you learned from it) gave depth to the world, gave you a villain to strive against and helped you become MORE as a character and as a player.
Now death is largely meaningless and because it is so meaningless it impacts the playerbase in a much different way.
But no Jules, this is just one of the reasons why I feel Imperian has gone downhill and bled players. It's a culmination of choices that I'd love to see reverted. But honestly, at this stage, I think the game is too far down the tunnel to turn around. There might be a way for it to push through and come out into the light on the other side, but if thats' going to happen in my opinion the game needs to learn from what it used to do right and not make any choices like the ones I've been talking about.
We need OPTIONS back. I mean... hell. If you wanted to invest a ton of stehl, bone, orichalcum or veritum you could make yourself some ridiculous sabres and go smash with them. You could equally, if you were Stavennite, craft some stupid slow axes that had like 180 on the top end of damage, soulquench them and go whack people for a 200 dsl every now and then. Who doesn't remember Clarke's DSL goodness?
Does it matter that that damage route was pretty much only available to Stavenn due to bone and soulquench mechanics? Hell no, because it add flavour. And it's not like Antioch didn't have an answer with Suicidedrop. Good old SSD. And what about Shield Dancers? Ruining peoples days because some freak was wielding two shields and spamming knockout and junk?
Yes it was not as balanced. But it was FUN because while each side had different tactics there was always an answer. I still maintain that there are other ways to handle things like Undead Runedancers than affinity and circles.
That said, I do agree imperian may have strayed a bit far away from having big flashy abilities in the name of balance. A perfectly balanced system does tend to not be very inclusive. I think a big culpret for that, as @Sarthan mentioned, is probably the circle system, just for somewhat different reasons.
Imperian is a very class factionalised game--more so than any of the other two ire games with a stable combat meta (I'm not including lusternia because they're doing the whole rewrite combat from scratch thing). Aetolia comes fairly close to imperian in this regard, but they do possess several non factionalised classes, and I don't think its a coincidence that said classes frequently get the most moderate/sensible classlead suggestions/discussion. It becomes even more pronounced if you look at Achaea. A single factional class can take up 15% or more of all classlead reports on a good day.
The problem with this is that factional classes, without fail, are both the biggest culprets to get aggressively targeted in classleads, and the ones most difficult to balance. That's the same across all three games, every classlead cycle without fail. Its much easier to reach a concensus on strong abilities (whether implementation or removal) if everyone has access to those abilities.
So yeah, I don't see adding potent abilities being overly viable for as long as highly hardcoded class factions exist (which look like there here to stay). One circle is always going to feel they got cheated and the others have access to better capstone abilities, or that an ability needs to be available to everyone then get frustrated when they're told its unnecessary, etc. Of course, the counter argument to that is that factional class diversity is a good thing and keeps things interesting. I'd request impirical evidence, because I've never seen anything in ire games that supports that claim. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Regarding death penalties, I'm actually one of those horrible people that agree that death in imperian is too trivial, but I'm not even going down that rabbit hole.
Now, I'll be the first one to admit that the old RP is, quite frankly, irrelevant and nobody actually cares about it anymore, to the point where I have literally posted "Antioch doesn't give a damn about antimagick anymore because the whole idea is ridiculous" as a Mukhtar and now take that stance as the cityleader. We'd be far better off if we dropped the whole anti-magick thing and just made lots of the classes neutral-faction classes that were available to anybody. Nobody in antimagick has any real investment in opposing magick anymore so it's the perfect time to do something like this. I mean, as the leader of Antioch I signed the city up to work with the Legion and the Blood God of the Horde and I am still the leader of Antioch. That should tell you exactly how much the playerbase cares about standing against magick.
"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 still like distinct factions, by the way, but yeah... different reasons. I mean distinct as in players are driven not to buddy up long term with other factions, and always have their own agenda.
As for death being trivial, I think part of what happens, is that it IS trivial to the wrong people (people who just keep coming back at shard falls but absolutely refuse to fight ever are a prime example). Or, it is not trivial to someone who did fight, but they are going to pretend it is, because they can. People still do not liking dying because people really don't like losing. It is just that there can be a disconnect in how they express that here. I wish we could address THAT without resorting to things that really are going to make a lot of people bow out entirely.
And Sarthan, I just tacked that question on at the end because it was true of so many people. There was this "I got time, how about you" mentality that just permeated every aspect of the games, and was definitely associated with age. I might be a bit bitter about those years
These kinds of things are, in my experience, just as likely to harm the PK scene as to help it. Your more serious PKers get tired of it and go "Okay, I'm done with this. Tell me when they fix it" and then they move off to Aetolia or somewhere and they don't come back when it's fixed. Your 'lesser' PKers ride the wave until it's fixed, but once it's over they never adapt to its loss, and many end up quitting over it. Imperian's dormant list is filled with both one-tactic wonders who quit playing when their victory button ceased to work and with good solid PvPers who said "Okay, a solid month of doubleshot/vodun/metrazol/calotropis is enough, I'm done."
"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."
Effective changes to Imperian combat takes too long. It took 6 months before the 60-70% health strikes of alive-soulquench-refresh-soulquench-dead was addressed. It doesn't take a genius to recognise that this is an issue.
While this may sound incredibly nerdy... since I left Imperian, I've written a Javascript engine to simulate 'Imperian-style' combat on my browser. I'm sitting here emulating 1v1, 1v2, 1v1v2, 2v2v2 combat scenarios that are equal to, if not more complicated than, Imperian combat. If something seems off/overly strong, I am rewriting that skill in all of 20 seconds.
On the other hand, I can suffer through 6 months of BS waiting for classleads.
While they are appreciably different exercises, and there is merit to letting a new skill run its course rather than knee-jerking things, 6 months to correct an over-the-top skill is way too long.
edit: I don't mean to say that strong abilities shouldn't exist. Yes, it's funny the first few times I get one-shotted despite the amount of time and resources allocated to the game. No, it's not funny after six months.
I thought about essentially chaining a would-be thief to a 2-3 room radius for a small period of time, but that also has high gank potential.
I think I may have been very, very wrong in liking the strong group aspect of plagues and boneyards, as enjoyable as it has been at times, and that boneyard theft almost needs to be instanced or something (with the thief being forced to enter a "boneyard" with a room or two around it, and face the owner alone - and also possibly not be able to leave immediately, if the owner comes) to be the glorious uber combatant exclusive system they are intended to be.
Once you take out the whole "We're Antimagick rar!" junk you open up a lot of possibilities. You say that if cross class buffing was fixed.. - lets talk about that for a second shall we? Circles and affinity were implemented as a direct result of things like runed Idras living in Stavenn tossing out standing Cigua Crescentcuts and killing people. OR Rumal doing his Undead Runed up Wardancer schtick and smushing people. It was supposed to give a sense of identity and keep things segregated. The problem with it is that it directly limited how people interact with each other. It became stupidly hard and restrictive to have a fun RP with the opposing faction because as soon as someone saw you talking to someone else it'd be like "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!". Affinity was put in to stop people from having runes and junk. (Hell with them though. I still wore Orichalcum armor for the bonus when bashing on my AM/Demonic characters) All that needs to be done is have buffs not work on particular classes. I mean last I checked you couldn't rune up a weapon and then use a whetstone on it. The roleplay was that the whetstone scratched the runes off, the design was that you couldn't doubledip into damage buffing a sword. Same principle.
Now say cross class buffing is fixed, the ideology was thrown out the window and you have a bunch of organizations who aren't restricted by who they hang out with. You don't have Stavenn being the ONLY city with everything because 'hell yeah'. There's nothing stopping Antioch or IThaqua or whatever else doing the same thing.
But then you're like "But wont the orgs all jsut be the same as each other minus some roleplay differences?" So you have Ithaqua still being 'we r frozun forests yay wolves' and Antioch living in sandy hell, Celidon being all gross forest and Kinsarmar still being "Duchy fo life!" But here's where you can add slightly factional classes like Achaea does. You have Ashtan and Hashan who allow Occultists, Mhaldor and Hashan who allow Necromancy, Targossas, Cyrene and I THINK Eleusis who allow Priests, Eleusis who have nature thingies and everyone who allows Alchemists. Then you have all the other 'regular' (I say regular not as a put down but I don't know what else to call them. They're freaking cool all of them) classes that can go everywhere.
Stuff gets fun real fast and I definitely think it could work here too.
I think a lot of gamers value excitement most highly, so if the game isn't providing that, these are not people who are going to stick around to just chit chat between "exciting thing happening" (but their bodies often do). Basically, most of your player base isn't anything like me, or say, Ultrix, who are fairly content to chatter away about pens, or shoes, or someone's new job/fiance if the game itself is slow, but also excited about going to a fight if we get the chance.
I find myself logging on less and less, and I think that's going to eventually mean tapering off. I mean, the only reason I will log on today at all, will be to play around with my fist full of gladiator tickets. I can't see myself not giving Imperian loads more chances, so it's not like I am "leaving forever" or anything, but I think we need to get ahead of this "not enough going on to keep (most) people tabbed in" problem sooner rather than later.
Yes, I'm talking about the gods. I'm not going to get into a The Gods vs Entities debate. We can if you want, but not in this post at least.
Now, the Gods were great when they had TEETH. I'm talking about when they had the ability to really touch the mortal world. Zap the shit out of people for being disrespectful, do grand events where people actually got killed in the crossfire, etc. It made the world feel vibrant. Danger, people. It really makes the world a much richer place.
Freaking Baar rampaging into Stavenn. Throwing out Sidekicks that popped out fire Elementals that started rampaging and junk. That's the stuff of legend.
Furthermore, having a God who is more than an abstract noncorporeal idea but is an actual physical being that will ALWAYS be stronger than you, but also elevates you to a position of authority and cherishes your service does wonders for a character.
Also @Iluv I'm glad you've seen the light. I've been saying that since it was first thrown out. You have people like @Jules who said "Yeah I'd quit." which makes me question whether she really wants to fight in the first place. Combat isn't something you should be babied in and it's something that SHOULD have consequences. You SHOULD want to tear your hair out and sometimes question your commitment to it. The answer should always be that yes, the suffering is worth it because Imperian combat is one of the greatest gaming experiences I've ever partaken of. It's unique. Experience can always be gained back and, in a world that is populated, bashing parties were an exceedingly common thing. People banded together to help that particular person who lost a level in a raid get it back.
Like i said. Consequences to dying impact far more than just one aspect of the game. Death: It helps the community grow stronger!
@Sarthan I don't think re-introducing the old death penalties everywhere would be a good solution but it would fit perfectly if it was contained in a PK FREE high end bashing area to balance out the increased gains.
All it's done is trivialize combat and lessen the impact death has upon the multiple facets it used to impact.