I post this every year in one way or another and I guess it has been a year or so.

I have been playing mostly mages and non villagers for the last couple of years and simply put, teleport and word of recall are too good at getting people out of difficult situations.

Putting people in difficult situations takes a significant amount of skill (which is honestly one of the biggest differences between an excellent player and a mediocre one in landing kills). Getting out of bad situations however takes virtually no skill and no preperation at all. Half of characters in the game have word or teleport built in to their skill sets, those that don't have easy access (you are considered a total noob if you aren't carrying these at all times).


Simply put we have engineered a situation where it is very easy to play a character that avoids death. Since the name of the game is carrionfields I want to suggest a few different ways that we could still preserve the ease of transportation for exploring but make it less useful as a no risk easy out of pk situations.

idea 1: transportation sickness
if you move yourself with word or teleport while in a state of adrenaline you have an 8 round lag on your landing.

Idea 2: timers!
if you word/teleport/gate/vanish you get slapped with a 0-3 tick timer during which you are too disoriented to try and use any of the mentioned skills again. Even if you don't do this for word/teleport putting a 0 tick timer on gate/vanish might be worthwhile.

idea 3: casting lag
word/teleport have a 1-2 round warm up before the spell actually goes thru, getting lagged causes you to not perform the ability until the lag expires.

idea 4: Chance to fail
My pincer doesn't work 100% of the time at 100% maybe transportation skills shouldn't either

idea 5: multiple occurence escalation
when teleporting/wording/gating/vanishing/forest havening multiple times in a certain time period keep bumping up the mana cost. So for instance if you teleport 4 times in say a ten tick period the first teleport is normal mana cost, the second is double the third triple, the fourth quadruple, etc. If people exceed their mana limit in that time then they die or whatever. You could leave an affect on their affect list called transportation daze or something so they can be aware of how they are stacking.

Idea 6: evaporation/crumblement
teleport/word staves, potions, scrolls end up with a low crumble timer so it gets difficult to stock pile them for those thos don't have it built in. Currently as any non mage class keeping 10 word and 10 teleport potions on you does not require much in the way of effort and lets you in essence have as much leeway as a mage in their use.


does anyone like any of these ideas or have more to add?

Dude, quit stressing. Once you get a LOT of mage kills just you logging in will shift the veil and make teleport and word spells fail ALL the time. It's those initial 50 that are tough though, but not worth all this time/brainstorming ways to land kills.

>Simply put we have engineered a situation where it is very
>easy to play a character that avoids death.

Yes. With huge qualifications. First, you have to be okay with never killing anybody. And you have to be okay with not solo exploring places you can't easily get out of. You may need to be okay with just sitting somewhere out of the way for your character's entire life. You probably can't join a cabal unless its Herald.

>idea 1: transportation sickness
>if you move yourself with word or teleport while in a state of
>adrenaline you have an 8 round lag on your landing.

This just makes it a little more dangerous. I'm still teleporting every single time. Maybe I eat a mob death or two; I can live with that.

By the way, the number of characters with single-digit deaths (over a long lifespan) is pretty small. If it were possible to have fun while totally mitigating the possibility of PK death then I'd expect us to see more characters like this.

There are actually a number of ways to screw a mage or communer, but people just don't seem to know about them.

So here are a few lesser known ones:

- Sting
- Bludgeon

Both of the above can leave someone in pain and cause them to lose concentration.

Cloud of wasps.
Power word pain (ok, this one isn't easy to get).
Go for the throat edge.

Then there's various things like deafen, mana drain, insects, hurl throat, choke, wait for prots to drop, then pincer.

Not to mention simply busting out lag at the right time, or using tactics that mean that even after teleporting you are in serious trouble.

nt

>Simply put we have engineered a situation where it is very
>easy to play a character that avoids death.


I think characters (and players) like this are subject to CF's version of natural selection - characters that avoid death tend to become extremely boring to play and seem to tail off. Players that play to avoid death tend to become bored with CF and tail off until they find a balance.

I know that's just my anecdotal observation, but then you're just offering your own anecdotal observation, so ... :)

Also, again, my anecdotal experience, but I'm not PKing or dying to PKs any less than I did 6 years ago. If anything, I'm probably doing more of both - and Scar's stats seem to bear that out. I have a suspicion that my experience is related to the "CF natural selection" I mentioned above - people who are playing are playing for fun and adrenaline, and they're challenging themselves to greater feats as opposed to plucking the low hanging fruit of avoiding PK death. But moreover, there are also a ton of skills that hinder PK death avoidance other than pure lagging skills (e.g., imperial spies, mark of the prey, offensive use of teleport, movement draining skills, movement/hp maledicts for almost every class, tesseract, gate .. I mean, really, the list goes on and on). Basically, it doesn't feel to me as though it's become harder to PK someone or get PK'd (although again, there are certainly those risk-adverse players that avoided the natural selection process by evolving into risk-adverse PK machines :P)

Sort of a side comment, I guess ...


> and they're challenging themselves to greater feats as opposed to plucking the low hanging fruit of avoiding PK death.

The only one I really know who seems to do that is Shaapa. He seems to like making characters that aren't supposed to work and make them scary. I think that makes him the perfect example of what you said above, and I applaud him for that. But I think he's the exception, rather than the rule*. And I am sure he still doesn't mind a little 'fruit' for the road either.

The vast majority of people want to get as much for themselves (get kills) with as little risk to themselves (not getting killed themselves). That's okay, that's human nature and common sense. We all are survivors, and weaseling yourself into and out of situations is the easy way to do it.

Sure, anyone who plays CF is competitive in nature at least to some degree, that does mean we like a challenge. But if getting that low hanging fruit helps you get there, we will take it. Especially if the 'fruit' happens to have gear on him that will get you there.

Sure, the challenge we put upon ourselves might be the sort of character that contradicts what I just said. Say, the Eddard Stark type. You know, the just and noble lord type, does what he has to do, doesn't have to like it, but does it anyway. But playing Ned Stark to the letter gets, well, boring. The flawed hero is interesting, not the holier than thou one.

That said (just an aside), Ned Stark does have one flaw, he failed the Machiavellian rule of "it's okay to be thought a noble and just ruler, but it's disastrous to be one".

Well, I think you know what I am getting at, by now ...


* By which I don't wish to say it's impossible anyone else does that too (to one degree or another).

If changing PK stats such that beating someone into teleporting to their near-immediate death would change how eager people are to teleport.

If you mean what I think you mean it would be a good change. :)
But I could be wrong.

I dont know about you, but it feels like 8/10 times my teleports land me in highlords, dragon ruins, or whistlewood. Especially at low ranks. Thats a bit more significant than your 1/20 chance of pincer failing

..that you are very good at selectively forgetting your normal, uneventful teleports. As for low ranks, there are more dangerous areas in low ranks and your survivability is less. This only confirms that you likely equate areas like Witch Wood with areas like High Lord's keep or you likely re-teleport a couple of times after not getting to a place where you wanted to, eventually end up in High Lords and count all those teleportations as single teleportation event when in fact you had multiple chances to remain in a place not High Lords if you hadn't re-teleported.

For me, it doesn't feel like teleports are taking me to dangerous locations more often than in good locations. In fact, I regard teleport as a reasonably safe spell if you are in good health.

nt

Simply put we have engineered a situation where it is very easy to play a character that avoids death.

A little grepping reveals:

6/09: 115 player deaths (8 rage deletions)
6/10: 105 player deaths (2 rage deletions)
6/11: 117 player deaths (2 rage deletions)
6/12: 177 player deaths (8 rage deletions)
6/13: 131 player deaths (4 rage deletions)

I appreciate the response but those stats are far from complete.

Ideally to frame this idea we would want to roughly determine the number of deaths vs the number of deaths avoided by use of transportation skills. Since you can't determine the second strictly through data analysis it becomes hard to really use stats when examining this issue.

Rewind 6 years and it was somewhat balanced because there was enough players on that the number of safe places was much smaller. Even though you could get away from person A by teleporting you might run right into person B or C. Now that we have fewer people and have tedencies to see them bunch up the whole ping pong factor is much lower than it was.

I think the point was more about since plenty of people die, then
those people aren't avoiding death by ANY means. Perhaps sparked
by the "this is carrionfields" comment. Just my take on it.