@Tyden I believe back in the day they used to give extra health for going over, but people were reaching near 900+ health and tanking things like you wouldn't believe. I think Andrea and Dias back in the day were tanking Rafe/Balan and keeping up with 200+ health sips or something like that.
I wouldn't be opposed though if say every 5 or 10 levels you get health/mana added after reaching aspect that counts as if you reached just one level over. Just a thought.
I feel like the rule of thumb for all such things in these games to keep in mind would sound something like "Unless it is -actually- impossible, someone will do it" (to get 900 health, or 250+ rapiers through old forging, or anything else that no reasonable person would ever even entertain trying to get to, because players, as a group are not reasonable people).
No, those levels never gave bonus health. The massive health totals were from a few certain quests, expensive consumables, buff-stacking back in the old days, and the high-con statpacks.
And as it is right now, Septus and I could break 1k if we wanted to and I can hit 800 trivially.
"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."
No, those levels never gave bonus health. The massive health totals were from a few certain quests, expensive consumables, buff-stacking back in the old days, and the high-con statpacks.
And as it is right now, Septus and I could break 1k if we wanted to and I can hit 800 trivially.
No, the massive health totals were from old moradeim stat shuffling. :P
I think another major problem with player retention in Imperian is probably the artifact levels. The playerbase is so small that we're very very top-heavy. You're not gonna fight the occasional artifact whale if you want to start fighting. No, you're going to find that the enemy lineup is nothing but artifact whales and that most of them can just bashcombo you down. You basically can't really get into it without a huge investment in artifacts. I mean, my average minion in Antioch is rolling full L2's or better, it's crazy hard to compete against that.
Bashing? It's sort of a similar story, everybody is decked, areas are empty, you cannot compete at all against them.
In a larger game like Achaea, this effect is mitigated somewhat by the sheer size; not everybody is an insane whale. But Imperian? Here's my CWHO: Khizan, Ultrix, Septus, Pellerin, Laeka, Robynn, Sela, Zera, Dyron.
Dyron is the one bit of new blood without big artifacts, and Sela and Zera don't fight. Of the combatants in my city Robynn is probably the least artifacted one there because she only has L1 offensive artifacts to go with her full suite of L2+ defensive ones. Everybody else is rolling L2's offensively as well as defensively.
The small size and high artifact concentration probably makes this the least friendly game to get into.
"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 don't know about that. There is a whole tier of Achaea that is unbelievably stacked. Like, "I have played this game since I was 15 and now I have a pretty good job and this is still my obsession" stacked. And their fights are actually bigger. A lot bigger. So you have like... minimum 4-6 people sniping you with their Lupine bows or w/e.
And exactly because we are so small, if you get to know people even a bit, not even like "super cool guy is my best buddy in all of the cool kid clans", we will probably lend you arties just about any time you ask. And we can give them to you for a full 2 hours, which is absolutely unique to us I think. We can also get you "welfare arties". These do technically exist in Achaea still, I think? Good luck getting your hands on them.
I agree a lot more with what you said on the last page, and I have felt the same way for a long time. Achaea has some nice things. It is legitimately a better game than it used to be. But a lot of what Achaea has, is just people. But that is so important, because you need people to attract people.
EDIT: and you're also talking about Antioch, which is the worst possible example. It's also an example of how players cluster in places they feel are more friendly to their playstyle, and also just... even where they feel most welcome. So surprise surprise, a big chunk of the game's decked out people who are interested in PK are in Antioch (with a couple more decked out weirdos in Ithaqua just because, but damn, if we're honest, we might as well be Antiochan).
It's honestly really hard to pick yourself and move too, because you're probably forcing yourself to go somewhere just to "balance the numbers" in fights, but now, not only are you not with as many like-minded people, you are also probably the minority in an entrenched power structure that at best, tolerates your playstyle, and at worst, doesn't care for it at all. I don't think the RP side of the house has that problem as much.
The barrier to entry of Imperian is too high and the low population makes it not worth it when they can go to Achaea instead. The introduction of a new 4th IRE MUD will only make things worse.
Third-Whatever happened to the news system being utilized? The last public news post was in May, and it was a mis-post for heavens sake. The last ACTUAL public news post was in March, and that was by an NPC. Nothing to me speaks to the population being very insular more than that. Nearly 6 months without a player-written public news post?
PUBLIC NEWS #3542 Date: 8/25/2016 at 10:57 From: Iniar Nullheart, Eighth Proselyte of the Gray To : Everyone Subj: Hello
The thing about Achaea is that Achaea has a lot more people so that the effect is diluted. When I play my (relatively) little Achaean there are other relatively little people around, it's not just newbies and artifact titans. Achaea's sheer size makes it more approachable instead of less approachable, where Imperian is the opposite.
"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."
You guys are JUST starting though. Achaea is new and fun and exciting, and has PEOPLE (I wholeheartedly agree with this being a lot of the problem, and also, the solution). Iluv has been doing some spars...
I mean, I get what you are saying, but what happens when you get into the actual conflict systems? And you're taking heat from (at least) 8-10 guys on each side? A lot of them probably artied to the teeth? I think the answer with you guys is "we'll artie up" but I don't know that I buy the idea of Achaea as this sort of paradise for the unartied/less artied - other than perhaps arena spars and the occasional duel, where yes, there is almost probably more diversity in both skill and artie level.
I am not against doing more to make the artie barrier less intimidating, but I am just saying I think we ALREADY do more. The artie loaning system tweak alone is absolutely huge... as well as the flip side of having so many artied people, which is, you can damned near pick which person you want L3 everything from. And really, so is the availability of the welfare arties, not to mention stat stones, actually.
Achaea doesn't have to be a paradise for the majority of Imperian to stop subbing elite here to sub there. It just has to be faster than the straggler running from the bear that is low population death.
The barrier to entry of Imperian is too high and the low population makes it not worth it when they can go to Achaea instead. The introduction of a new 4th IRE MUD will only make things worse.
Currently, we have 5 muds (Achaea, Aetolia, Imperian, Lusternia, & MKO) So Starmourn is actually IRE's 6th MUD, but will be the 5th open one when it does.
Okay. Keep it civil please (the debate above is getting too much)
I have been rethinking some of the things we were trying to get done by the end of the year (like the dynamic quest system). We will probably push these back a little and redo other things first. Currently the top things on my list are monolith update, opening up some professions across circles (a few), and city population sizes.
City size is something we have been talking about for a while. I have been trying to kill a city for a couple years. I agree with Septus that killing a city off completely, with no warning, in a catastrophic event will result in people quitting.
That said, six cities is too many, even for a larger game like Achaea.
We have been considering merging some via an event, such as Stavenn into Khandava as Stavenn has been fairly dead. I feel like coordinating it with players, versus just doing it, has to be done so people feel involved.
Codewise, there are two ways to do it.
1. Merge one city into the other and retain the org name of one. This basically deletes one org. 2. Merge two cities into one with a new org name, in a new location. This deletes 2 orgs and makes a new one.
Storywise we can come up with a ton of ways to do it, while also shifting the focus off magick, am, demonic, whatever.
I probably need to make a new thread for this, and I will split it off later if we need to. Merging cities or circles needs to be pretty transparent with players though, even if it makes the story part of it kinda boring because the outcome is predetermined.
I figure you guys are already all over this (or it might not even be an issue, not sure how the opening up of classes will work), but I figure it can't ever hurt to be sure:
If you do make one of druid/monk/summoner open, the other two should be open too, or one circle will have an inferior ranged situation to the other two which would kind of suck. That's the only real potential issue I could see cropping up (outside of very minor issues that would likely be trivially addressed in classleads), so just wanted to mention it since that's the only real way a circle "loses" in this situation. I figure those three probably aren't on your list anyway, but just in case!
If you do make one of druid/monk/summoner open, the other two should be open too, or one circle will have an inferior ranged situation to the other two which would kind of suck. That's the only real potential issue I could see cropping up (outside of very minor issues that would likely be trivially addressed in classleads), so just wanted to mention it since that's the only real way a circle "loses" in this situation. I figure those three probably aren't on your list anyway, but just in case!
I don't know, I feel like monk, druid, summoner would be pretty perfect. You'd get additional CC and ranged options regardless of your circle, which could make group combat quite a bit more dynamic.
It'd definitely be interesting. My main point is that if you open one, you have to open all three, because otherwise one circle is very much going to be in a bad spot.
I like Imperian more than Achaea. I think that, in many ways, Imperian is a much better game than Achaea. And I think that if Imperian had ever received the attention that it deserved that it might be the biggest IRE game by now, because when Imperian was released it was MUCH better than either of the other two.
However, that didn't happen. Imperian never got that. Instead, we had things like "Old Doubleshot persists for a month and more at Imperian's peak and drove away tons of fighters", "Old Vodun makes lots of people quit when they get shaken down to nothing, absolutely nothing is done about it for months on end", and just generally a super slow development cycle that badly stunted our growth when the game was young and that persists to this day. It's fairly routine for horribly broken stuff to just persist for months on end waiting for the next classlead cycle. Soulquench/negate/soulquench/soulstorm. Strike/Strike/Suicidedrop. Old maul having like 90% armor penetration(also used to be able to do maul and then an offbalance grove lightning, that lasted forever, too). Things like this. Lots of things like this.
Really, this is another one of the big problems with attracting players to Imperian. Players get into combat. They get wrecked by one of these things. They ask what's up. They get told "Oh, wardancers just instantly kill you, it's how they are." They ask when it's going to be fixed. They get told "Maybe in a few months if classleads go our way". Then they nope on out of here because who the hell wants to get mulched for two months by attacks that do 98% of your max health?
Having a faster turnaround on things like this probably won't gain you many players, but it'll make it a lot easier to hold on to the ones you do get.
"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 neutral classes should help a lot with that. I really hope they eventually make ALL of classes neutral, for that exact reason.
Imperian has a HELL of a lot going for it in so many areas. It's why I came over and spent WAY more $$$ than I ever did in Achaea, and also why I have clung to it so hard. It has more of the things I want than any other game. Except lately... players...
tbh, I'd rather not be the biggest game though. Being the biggest game actually has certain drawbacks. I'd just like to be bigger. Sustainable. And not just bigger, but frankly, active. People actually at their keyboards and interested enough to not AFK for hours on end.
There's been a lot of discussion lately about neutral professions, and I'm personally a pretty big fan. It would obviously need to be a gradual process, but I think it would really improve the health of the game if people weren't restricted to one circle over another based on what class they want to play. I think that, at least with the people I've heard from, there's a consensus that it wouldn't be a terrible thing for all the professions to eventually be neutral.
And, to keep with the theme of each circle (where applicable), each class could be re-skinned so that it's aesthetically and thematically different when a person joins x circle, though the mechanics wouldn't change. There are certain professions that would need this re-skinning a lot more than others, and while it would be a fairly big project, I'm pretty confident that a lot of people player-side would be eager to help out in the interest of having that sort of widespread access to all of our amazing, unique classes.
More important than probably anything else, though, this sort of opening up of our classes would remove a lot of the bias present in classleads. People would no longer be trying to push for an advantage for their circle over another person's, but rather to keep the entire game as a whole balanced, interesting, and fun.
I figure something like Templar will get a less AM-ish look for example, and you can do unique loyals where applicable, but doing a full 60 prof skins on top of everything else would be a big project yes. Players helping out might really help. It also might make it even more work. Because players. I am sure that there will be some reskins and that player input will be a big part of it for sure, though. But that's different than counting on us to shoulder part of the load. And skins do matter. They are one of those things that are "more important than you thought". There is a reason every newb keeps picking Predator!
Way back when, I suggested a bit of a different way to get to the same place we're hopefully headed now. I figured 6-8 total (shared) classes for the game (with unique circle skins to make the players happy) would be a lot more manageable for admin in a game that doesn't (currently) have the same kind of dedicated staff Achaea does (and as I think about it, I still feel that way). Barring that, I wanted every circle to have access to the same abilities. And barring THAT, I wanted them to have access to abilities that produced the same effect. Even more importantly, yes, I always felt the role of self-interest in classleads couldn't be anything BUT problematic when I have radiance and you don't and you have ansuz and I don't. You don't need to be an elite combatant to know that players are going to be players. People pretty much hated the idea at the time. It is my special gift... I think it was partly because times were different (there was some writing on the wall I think, but we weren't where we are now), and it definitely feels like a pretty big paring down of "variety".
But hrm. Do we want to have 6-8 awesome, solid classes that admin can really focus on and have a shot at executing really, really well with the manpower they have, or do we want to slowly try to trickle 20 classes that have been designed to be adversaries into a common pool for the next few years and correct as we go? In a game that maybe? probably? doesn't have the staff for that. And if 6-8 is just way too few and you hate that and it is horribly boring even if those classes kick ass, is it still possible that 20 is too many? I think it might be.
Here's another issue even if everything else goes perfectly and Garryn just whips it all right up for us. There are 20 profs (with a couple mechanical duplicates). If even most of them are useful in the new order of things (once we get there), I am going to pull my hair out trying to keep up with the class switching I will need to do as tactics x, y and z wax and wane. Because if the profs are useful, they are going to be a factor. That isn't a joke. I am pretty worried about it the more I think about it. On that note, I don't feel that a bit of paring down would make us some kind of horrible barebones game.
I am just throwing this out there. I think it's important and might get us closer to a good place, but I am also well aware it might be horribly received. Probably even. Realistic expectations... Still, I am pretty much over the moon that we're going to start pushing towards neutral classes.
I'm a little late for when my particular problem with Imperian was mentioned, but I'm going to post it anyways.
When I tried this game back quite a while ago, I didn't like what seemed to be the playerbase breaking away from the lore here. It confused me when it came to developing RP for my character, and I couldn't really find a strong, organized cause to fight for. It was like the RP focus was nonexistent, and I felt like the players were just flailing about, finding random reasons to produce conflict that made no sense at all.
I'll use Antioch as an example. I don't remember what it was exactly, but I do remember the leadership making decisions that completely went against the backstory of the game. Frankly, that turned me off. It gave me the impression of a severe lack of focus. The orgs felt weak, and I had absolutely no motivation to create an intriguing, in-depth character here.
In any of these games, there simply has to be a fairly strict conflict arc. While some slight deviation should be possible, the admin in these games should be strict with the lore and org direction.
Imperian has always sort of had a problem with that. It was designed with this three-way conflict in mind. Aggressive expansionist demoners, freedom-loving magickers, religious zealots determined to crush out both factions. I think this was done in large part because Achaea and Aetolia largely had dual-factioned good/evil conflicts in them and they wanted to change things up and avoid that kind of structure because it was both overplayed in both of their other properties, and because it was susceptible to things like "One entire faction gets crushed and losers playerbase and suddenly there's nothing happening."
This worked out really well in the early days, honestly. Events were run in such a way that there were three possible outcomes that fit each circle. We had objectives like "I want my faction to control this thing that is relatively faction independent", like the Smithing changes or the seed that grew that tree that let you out of Dis.
Over time, though, we lost all that kind of event and we started getting things that were more "This is the good choice and this is the bad choice", the kind of thing I'd expect out of Achaea where there is a literal God of Evil. All events in recent memory have pretty much been things like "AN EVIL NECROMANCER IS EXPERIMENTING ON ORPHANS. DO YOU HELP HIM? [Y/N]" and "The evil demon/spirit/bad-thing Legion who ruined the Underworld is trying to unleash plagues on the world. Do you want to unleash plagues?"
Now then, demonic is the nominally evil side. They summon demons, eat hearts, vivisect people, raise the dead, etc. All that standard issue bad guy jazz. However, demonic also has a lot of people who care a lot about RP. So when they're faced with a tough choice like "Do you want to unleash terrible hellplagues on the world for no real reward at all?" they give the reasonable answer of "No, that doesn't sound like a thing we'd be interested in, we sort of need this world ourselves and we'd rather not have it covered in terrible hellplagues."
And that sort of puts Antioch in a pickle. Cause now we have two options.
Option A: We say "Yeah, plagues aren't really our thing" and work against them. --->Pros: Maintains our RP role in the world. --->Cons: It's boring as all hell.
Option B: We say "Oh hell yes that sounds awesome, let's do that thing with the plagues" --->Pros: It's fun. We get fights. We have a goal to work for and enemies opposing us --->Cons: It's against our RP role in the world.
The problem here is that I don't play this game to do boring things. I play this game to do fun awesome things and get into fights. And so when RP faces off against fun, fun wins 10 times out of 10. No contest.
Basically, it comes down to this: If they wanted us to stay within our role, they should have made our role more fun. And it's especially frustrating, because Antioch is the most warlike faction in the entire game. All they really have to do is frame the event mechanics in a fashion that would make AM the antagonist and pit the rest of the world against us. We'd be rabidly anti-magick. Demonic and Magick would get to be the good guys. RP would be met. Everybody would be happy.
But instead of that we get this thing where they ignore the demonic circle's desire to be reasonable and avoid doing pointlessly evil crap for the sake of pointless evil and they ignore anti-magick's desire to be the antagonist instead of just the generic good guys, and they give us more events about "Evil Necromancer Victor McPuppykiller is poisoning puppies for no good reason at all, do you want to him him?" It is the most frustrating thing in the world.
"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."
No matter what anyone else says, I feel like Antioch kinda lost its RP when the Gods got killed off. It went from being crusader type "burn the heathens, for the glory of the Gods" and etc, to having nothing at all. I don't think anything really replaced it. I know a lot of forum posters hated the God stuff, but I actually liked it. Can't comment on the other cities though, having had nothing to do with them!
Sometimes I honestly wish we could satisfy the people who want Gods and (a very particular brand of) "RP" without actually having to DEAL with Gods and old school, very rigid RP. And everything that seems to come with both of those things And maybe we can, at least to a point.
I like lore too. I mean, I just enjoy reading what happened, what creatures are in the world, especially if it's on a wiki. I enjoy stuff like looking around and exploring and finding every single place that sells tea. And I do want some people around who don't have the attitude that "I know absolutely everything about how to kill people, but even if I DID know where all of the tea was I'd pretend I didn't because that's stupid". I like those people too, but they will not ever care about the tea! Or the purse guns (Antiochan ladies carry purse guns, it's dangerous out there). Or anything like that.
That said, I don't know about this persistent idea that Antioch RP (and there is an RP there) has been horribly unappealing to everyone. In thread after thread now, people sometimes go as far as insinuating that Antioch itself had a big hand in the game's low population, because "there was no RP there". We do make a good scapegoat. But Antioch gained a LOT of people in several events. And not just any kind of people. People who wanted to DO things. I like people like that. But we haven't had stuff for them to do in awhile.
Still, there are definitely some people who hate everything Antioch has done and everything about that playstyle period. I wish more people would embrace the idea that RP can be molded to fit what is going to be fun and exciting. If there is going to be something that is tradition and part of the game culture, let's make it THAT.
RP is what almost always has the most potential to be flexible, on the micro level with player to player interactions, all the way up to admin laying out what options players will have in events.
Because the events really are already somewhat on rails. Antioch is just picking whatever the other two sides didn't. And the other two sides are picking what Antioch traditionally would have picked, because yes, they don't find the cartoon evil appealing, and they ARE putting RP before fun. Blame them if you hate it so much. Or blame admin for laying out cartoon evil in front of players that have repeatedly shown they aren't into it. Or both! That said, I think it's taken Antioch in a pretty interesting direction anyway. I don't think Antioch (or that playstyle in general) is our problem.
The thing about killing the Gods off is it directly affected the RP of half the AM circle's classes. Priests, Templars, and Monks(not as much as the other two perhaps) suddenly found themselves in a very odd situation. I know of at least one person that literally quit the game because it totally ruined her RP. Not to say it didn't hurt the other circles as well. Janus and Eloweth were hugely involve with magick, and who can forget Thanatos? That void hasn't been replaced in the game.
I dont think it would have been as big a deal in the long run if the entity thing played out better. But seeing as how there's more dead entities than live ones, I'm not sure what the deal is with them. The entities seem to serve far less a purpose than the Gods did. I mean, the entity comes and goes, but the sect still remains. If your going to kill off the entity, shouldn't you kill off the sect too? The entities just seem so...pointless. The Two circles with the highest population have zero entities, and one circle(obstensibly the smallest, least populated one) has three?
"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."
If your going to kill off the entity, shouldn't you kill off the sect too? The entities just seem so...pointless. The Two circles with the highest population have zero entities, and one circle(obstensibly the smallest, least populated one) has three?
Sects largely came about to avoid the thing where you had half a dozen different players going through the same god shell, playing the same being in different ways, having to try and meet the expectations of the players who followed them. The new person playing Baar still had to act all properly Baar like and was expected to remember things that the last Baar was doing.
Sects and entities are designed in a way that avoids this. Now when a volunteer quites, the entity they played dies, but the sect and its RP and its rituals and everything else persists. This means that the players get to keep doing their thing in the same manner that Orders existed with an inactive God, and the next volunteer to work with that sect isn't stuck taking over a pre-existing character and having to tailor themselves the last player's role. It is a good thing.
Killing the sect when the entity dies would be like killing the Order when the God went inactive and it would just mean that we'd have zero sects.
"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."
Comments
I wouldn't be opposed though if say every 5 or 10 levels you get health/mana added after reaching aspect that counts as if you reached just one level over. Just a thought.
And as it is right now, Septus and I could break 1k if we wanted to and I can hit 800 trivially.
"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."
Bashing? It's sort of a similar story, everybody is decked, areas are empty, you cannot compete at all against them.
In a larger game like Achaea, this effect is mitigated somewhat by the sheer size; not everybody is an insane whale. But Imperian? Here's my CWHO: Khizan, Ultrix, Septus, Pellerin, Laeka, Robynn, Sela, Zera, Dyron.
Dyron is the one bit of new blood without big artifacts, and Sela and Zera don't fight. Of the combatants in my city Robynn is probably the least artifacted one there because she only has L1 offensive artifacts to go with her full suite of L2+ defensive ones. Everybody else is rolling L2's offensively as well as defensively.
The small size and high artifact concentration probably makes this the least friendly game to get into.
"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."
And exactly because we are so small, if you get to know people even a bit, not even like "super cool guy is my best buddy in all of the cool kid clans", we will probably lend you arties just about any time you ask. And we can give them to you for a full 2 hours, which is absolutely unique to us I think. We can also get you "welfare arties". These do technically exist in Achaea still, I think? Good luck getting your hands on them.
I agree a lot more with what you said on the last page, and I have felt the same way for a long time. Achaea has some nice things. It is legitimately a better game than it used to be. But a lot of what Achaea has, is just people. But that is so important, because you need people to attract people.
EDIT: and you're also talking about Antioch, which is the worst possible example. It's also an example of how players cluster in places they feel are more friendly to their playstyle, and also just... even where they feel most welcome. So surprise surprise, a big chunk of the game's decked out people who are interested in PK are in Antioch (with a couple more decked out weirdos in Ithaqua just because, but damn, if we're honest, we might as well be Antiochan).
It's honestly really hard to pick yourself and move too, because you're probably forcing yourself to go somewhere just to "balance the numbers" in fights, but now, not only are you not with as many like-minded people, you are also probably the minority in an entrenched power structure that at best, tolerates your playstyle, and at worst, doesn't care for it at all. I don't think the RP side of the house has that problem as much.
Your my hero.
"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 mean, I get what you are saying, but what happens when you get into the actual conflict systems? And you're taking heat from (at least) 8-10 guys on each side? A lot of them probably artied to the teeth? I think the answer with you guys is "we'll artie up" but I don't know that I buy the idea of Achaea as this sort of paradise for the unartied/less artied - other than perhaps arena spars and the occasional duel, where yes, there is almost probably more diversity in both skill and artie level.
I am not against doing more to make the artie barrier less intimidating, but I am just saying I think we ALREADY do more. The artie loaning system tweak alone is absolutely huge... as well as the flip side of having so many artied people, which is, you can damned near pick which person you want L3 everything from. And really, so is the availability of the welfare arties, not to mention stat stones, actually.
Just as an FYI!
If you do make one of druid/monk/summoner open, the other two should be open too, or one circle will have an inferior ranged situation to the other two which would kind of suck. That's the only real potential issue I could see cropping up (outside of very minor issues that would likely be trivially addressed in classleads), so just wanted to mention it since that's the only real way a circle "loses" in this situation. I figure those three probably aren't on your list anyway, but just in case!
However, that didn't happen. Imperian never got that. Instead, we had things like "Old Doubleshot persists for a month and more at Imperian's peak and drove away tons of fighters", "Old Vodun makes lots of people quit when they get shaken down to nothing, absolutely nothing is done about it for months on end", and just generally a super slow development cycle that badly stunted our growth when the game was young and that persists to this day. It's fairly routine for horribly broken stuff to just persist for months on end waiting for the next classlead cycle. Soulquench/negate/soulquench/soulstorm. Strike/Strike/Suicidedrop. Old maul having like 90% armor penetration(also used to be able to do maul and then an offbalance grove lightning, that lasted forever, too). Things like this. Lots of things like this.
Really, this is another one of the big problems with attracting players to Imperian. Players get into combat. They get wrecked by one of these things. They ask what's up. They get told "Oh, wardancers just instantly kill you, it's how they are." They ask when it's going to be fixed. They get told "Maybe in a few months if classleads go our way". Then they nope on out of here because who the hell wants to get mulched for two months by attacks that do 98% of your max health?
Having a faster turnaround on things like this probably won't gain you many players, but it'll make it a lot easier to hold on to the ones you do get.
"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."
Imperian has a HELL of a lot going for it in so many areas. It's why I came over and spent WAY more $$$ than I ever did in Achaea, and also why I have clung to it so hard. It has more of the things I want than any other game. Except lately... players...
tbh, I'd rather not be the biggest game though. Being the biggest game actually has certain drawbacks. I'd just like to be bigger. Sustainable. And not just bigger, but frankly, active. People actually at their keyboards and interested enough to not AFK for hours on end.
And, to keep with the theme of each circle (where applicable), each class could be re-skinned so that it's aesthetically and thematically different when a person joins x circle, though the mechanics wouldn't change. There are certain professions that would need this re-skinning a lot more than others, and while it would be a fairly big project, I'm pretty confident that a lot of people player-side would be eager to help out in the interest of having that sort of widespread access to all of our amazing, unique classes.
More important than probably anything else, though, this sort of opening up of our classes would remove a lot of the bias present in classleads. People would no longer be trying to push for an advantage for their circle over another person's, but rather to keep the entire game as a whole balanced, interesting, and fun.
Way back when, I suggested a bit of a different way to get to the same place we're hopefully headed now. I figured 6-8 total (shared) classes for the game (with unique circle skins to make the players happy) would be a lot more manageable for admin in a game that doesn't (currently) have the same kind of dedicated staff Achaea does (and as I think about it, I still feel that way). Barring that, I wanted every circle to have access to the same abilities. And barring THAT, I wanted them to have access to abilities that produced the same effect. Even more importantly, yes, I always felt the role of self-interest in classleads couldn't be anything BUT problematic when I have radiance and you don't and you have ansuz and I don't. You don't need to be an elite combatant to know that players are going to be players. People pretty much hated the idea at the time. It is my special gift... I think it was partly because times were different (there was some writing on the wall I think, but we weren't where we are now), and it definitely feels like a pretty big paring down of "variety".
But hrm. Do we want to have 6-8 awesome, solid classes that admin can really focus on and have a shot at executing really, really well with the manpower they have, or do we want to slowly try to trickle 20 classes that have been designed to be adversaries into a common pool for the next few years and correct as we go? In a game that maybe? probably? doesn't have the staff for that. And if 6-8 is just way too few and you hate that and it is horribly boring even if those classes kick ass, is it still possible that 20 is too many? I think it might be.
Here's another issue even if everything else goes perfectly and Garryn just whips it all right up for us. There are 20 profs (with a couple mechanical duplicates). If even most of them are useful in the new order of things (once we get there), I am going to pull my hair out trying to keep up with the class switching I will need to do as tactics x, y and z wax and wane. Because if the profs are useful, they are going to be a factor. That isn't a joke. I am pretty worried about it the more I think about it. On that note, I don't feel that a bit of paring down would make us some kind of horrible barebones game.
I am just throwing this out there. I think it's important and might get us closer to a good place, but I am also well aware it might be horribly received. Probably even. Realistic expectations... Still, I am pretty much over the moon that we're going to start pushing towards neutral classes.
When I tried this game back quite a while ago, I didn't like what seemed to be the playerbase breaking away from the lore here. It confused me when it came to developing RP for my character, and I couldn't really find a strong, organized cause to fight for. It was like the RP focus was nonexistent, and I felt like the players were just flailing about, finding random reasons to produce conflict that made no sense at all.
I'll use Antioch as an example. I don't remember what it was exactly, but I do remember the leadership making decisions that completely went against the backstory of the game. Frankly, that turned me off. It gave me the impression of a severe lack of focus. The orgs felt weak, and I had absolutely no motivation to create an intriguing, in-depth character here.
In any of these games, there simply has to be a fairly strict conflict arc. While some slight deviation should be possible, the admin in these games should be strict with the lore and org direction.
This worked out really well in the early days, honestly. Events were run in such a way that there were three possible outcomes that fit each circle. We had objectives like "I want my faction to control this thing that is relatively faction independent", like the Smithing changes or the seed that grew that tree that let you out of Dis.
Over time, though, we lost all that kind of event and we started getting things that were more "This is the good choice and this is the bad choice", the kind of thing I'd expect out of Achaea where there is a literal God of Evil. All events in recent memory have pretty much been things like "AN EVIL NECROMANCER IS EXPERIMENTING ON ORPHANS. DO YOU HELP HIM? [Y/N]" and "The evil demon/spirit/bad-thing Legion who ruined the Underworld is trying to unleash plagues on the world. Do you want to unleash plagues?"
Now then, demonic is the nominally evil side. They summon demons, eat hearts, vivisect people, raise the dead, etc. All that standard issue bad guy jazz. However, demonic also has a lot of people who care a lot about RP. So when they're faced with a tough choice like "Do you want to unleash terrible hellplagues on the world for no real reward at all?" they give the reasonable answer of "No, that doesn't sound like a thing we'd be interested in, we sort of need this world ourselves and we'd rather not have it covered in terrible hellplagues."
And that sort of puts Antioch in a pickle. Cause now we have two options.
Option A: We say "Yeah, plagues aren't really our thing" and work against them.
--->Pros: Maintains our RP role in the world.
--->Cons: It's boring as all hell.
Option B: We say "Oh hell yes that sounds awesome, let's do that thing with the plagues"
--->Pros: It's fun. We get fights. We have a goal to work for and enemies opposing us
--->Cons: It's against our RP role in the world.
The problem here is that I don't play this game to do boring things. I play this game to do fun awesome things and get into fights. And so when RP faces off against fun, fun wins 10 times out of 10. No contest.
Basically, it comes down to this: If they wanted us to stay within our role, they should have made our role more fun. And it's especially frustrating, because Antioch is the most warlike faction in the entire game. All they really have to do is frame the event mechanics in a fashion that would make AM the antagonist and pit the rest of the world against us. We'd be rabidly anti-magick. Demonic and Magick would get to be the good guys. RP would be met. Everybody would be happy.
But instead of that we get this thing where they ignore the demonic circle's desire to be reasonable and avoid doing pointlessly evil crap for the sake of pointless evil and they ignore anti-magick's desire to be the antagonist instead of just the generic good guys, and they give us more events about "Evil Necromancer Victor McPuppykiller is poisoning puppies for no good reason at all, do you want to him him?" It is the most frustrating thing in the world.
"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 lore too. I mean, I just enjoy reading what happened, what creatures are in the world, especially if it's on a wiki. I enjoy stuff like looking around and exploring and finding every single place that sells tea. And I do want some people around who don't have the attitude that "I know absolutely everything about how to kill people, but even if I DID know where all of the tea was I'd pretend I didn't because that's stupid". I like those people too, but they will not ever care about the tea! Or the purse guns (Antiochan ladies carry purse guns, it's dangerous out there). Or anything like that.
That said, I don't know about this persistent idea that Antioch RP (and there is an RP there) has been horribly unappealing to everyone. In thread after thread now, people sometimes go as far as insinuating that Antioch itself had a big hand in the game's low population, because "there was no RP there". We do make a good scapegoat. But Antioch gained a LOT of people in several events. And not just any kind of people. People who wanted to DO things. I like people like that. But we haven't had stuff for them to do in awhile.
Still, there are definitely some people who hate everything Antioch has done and everything about that playstyle period. I wish more people would embrace the idea that RP can be molded to fit what is going to be fun and exciting. If there is going to be something that is tradition and part of the game culture, let's make it THAT.
RP is what almost always has the most potential to be flexible, on the micro level with player to player interactions, all the way up to admin laying out what options players will have in events.
Because the events really are already somewhat on rails. Antioch is just picking whatever the other two sides didn't. And the other two sides are picking what Antioch traditionally would have picked, because yes, they don't find the cartoon evil appealing, and they ARE putting RP before fun. Blame them if you hate it so much. Or blame admin for laying out cartoon evil in front of players that have repeatedly shown they aren't into it. Or both! That said, I think it's taken Antioch in a pretty interesting direction anyway. I don't think Antioch (or that playstyle in general) is our problem.
I dont think it would have been as big a deal in the long run if the entity thing played out better. But seeing as how there's more dead entities than live ones, I'm not sure what the deal is with them. The entities seem to serve far less a purpose than the Gods did. I mean, the entity comes and goes, but the sect still remains. If your going to kill off the entity, shouldn't you kill off the sect too? The entities just seem so...pointless. The Two circles with the highest population have zero entities, and one circle(obstensibly the smallest, least populated one) has three?
Think less Benedictine and more Shaolin.
"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."
Sects and entities are designed in a way that avoids this. Now when a volunteer quites, the entity they played dies, but the sect and its RP and its rituals and everything else persists. This means that the players get to keep doing their thing in the same manner that Orders existed with an inactive God, and the next volunteer to work with that sect isn't stuck taking over a pre-existing character and having to tailor themselves the last player's role. It is a good thing.
Killing the sect when the entity dies would be like killing the Order when the God went inactive and it would just mean that we'd have zero sects.
"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'll go drown myself in the spring now.