No matter what you like least about CF, it's just about guaranteed that one or more other players have it as one of their favorite things.

If you keep complaining about something and e just won't change it, this is usually the reason why.

Have Arvam act as the voice of the Imms (if he's willing). Seriously. That's gonna remove a lot of "he said, she said, I misinterpret this" from a lot of rationally minded players.

Meh. PR hasn't been bad from what I can tell since Valg left.

Daevryn and Rayihn don't tend to post much/anything that I find as unreasonable and they do a lot that lets me know they care about the playerbase.

Valg on the other hand would've just flamed you and then deleted your responses.

Not saying that Daev/Ray have been doing anything bad, but Arvam's response is more comprehensive and gives a better idea of how things stand.

Also, my impression is that Arvam has been gone for a bit, so he has a more objective view of things (once again, not saying Daev/Ray are really subjective, but Arvam is more objective).

Anyways, just by 2 cents.

I will certainly speak up and share my views but everyone on this staff is going to as well. We're a team and the wide variety of perspectives makes us what we are. You might not like what the others have to say but they've got great insights and things to share as well and it's important for all of us to stay connected to the playerbase, for better or worse. We have our disagreements and our "WTF were they thinking?!"...but at the end of the day we're here because we dig this game and wanna keep it going. (Even amongst the imms themselves!)

...and part of that is making sure we make a game people wanna play and keep the players happy. Easier said than done and when people are as passionate about this on both sides of the fence? There's gonna be flare ups. I've already rambled a metric ####ton about my general take on responding to player feedback but again the cliff notes. We listen, but we analyze and the right course of action isn't always the obvious one. ...also manpower, coders, blah blah blah.

I definitely understand your point of view. As you said, everyone is invested in this game, and sometimes irrational thoughts and tempers flame up from both the administration and the players.

However, your posts not only have been extremely thorough and thought out, but demonstrate a sense of maturity that I haven't really seen from most posts, players and imms alike. This is not a potshot at Daev or Ray. This is not a potshot at the imms. This is a compliment to you and what I perceive to be an effective way to handle most/many situations if there are questions/issues/complaints being addressed among the administration and the playerbase.

As for the objectiveness, I remember a time where I became so invested into the game and what I perceive to be "fair" and "right" that I lost sight of other perspectives. After being detached from the game, I realized how stupid I was and the follies of my actions/statements. At this point, it's obvious that certain imms and certain players views have been colored. I thought that you're bringing in a fresh new breeze that hasn't been seen in a long time.

>No matter what you like least about CF, it's just about
>guaranteed that one or more other players have it as one of
>their favorite things.
>
>If you keep complaining about something and e just won't
>change it, this is usually the reason why.

I know some people actually like skill practice because they have deep-rooted psychological problems, but do you actually think anyone has it as a favorite thing?

Thinking about skill practice turns me off playing many a character.

I legitimately enjoy it at times. It is why you will see some of my characters have many more 100%s than could legitimately be useful for anything to them.

I already acknowledged there are mentally disturbed individuals who find it a plus. I just refuse to believe it's anyone's favorite (or even among their favorites).

to KNOWING your skill %s are better than your opponent's, so you have an advantage.

I don't want to be at that disadvantage, and I can't stand the practice.

if your only 90+% skill is trip, well I guess you're tripping. Can you get kills? damn right you can, but your targets are limited.

Solo rank (or at least tank as much as possible for a group) and dont spam quests and your weapon skills and defenses should be fine. It isnt a big enough disadvantage that the guy less pk skilled than you is gonna beat you if hes perfected and you arent.

It only becomes a big deal if you're say a transmuter who sleeps through combat slowed and does nothing but soak exp and provide buff/debuff.

>Solo rank (or at least tank as much as possible for a group)
>and dont spam quests and your weapon skills and defenses
>should be fine. It isnt a big enough disadvantage that the
>guy less pk skilled than you is gonna beat you if hes
>perfected and you arent.

Solo ranking is horribly inefficient for most classes/races. So what you're saying is basically I can either rank as I would naturally and then mindlesslely practice, or I can combine my mindless practice with ranking inefficiently. That doesn't seem like an improvement, and a good way to die a lot.

I enjoy skill practice to some extent for a few reasons...

1) It keeps orcs, cloud and fire giants down. This is probably a good thing for RP reasons. Yuh!

2) When I play during work hours, I can't really PVP because I might have to hop on a call or something that takes up too much of my concentration. This is the ideal time to go chill out and spam up skills...simultaneously ranking and gathering cash.

3) It's a great thing to do while your range sucks...gives you something where you can feel like you're making headway even when you're hidden off at a far corner of the earth spamming stuff up.

4) It's a legitimate skill knowing good places to practice stuff and solo rank. I guard my ranking and practicing areas as secrets and its why people almost never bother me while I'm doing these things. This also plays into how this is a useful thing to do while your PK range is awfully imbalanced.

With that being said, there's a few skills that probably should get addressed in terms of learning rates. The few I'm thinking of that should be looked at is ones where you can perfect them within an hour by having an OOC buddy coordinate with you to get it perfected. Evade and parting blow come to mind off the top of my head as "sketchy" sorts of skills to spam up. You can spam up evade for instance by having two flying people spamming trip on each other (with no lag when evade doesn't kick in) *MUCH* faster than by fighting a mob that kicks in combat or something and evading those.

I personally don't want to cheat or go OOC to spam stuff up but when its 1 hour versus 100+ hours it's awfully tempting...probably for no good reason.

There's also a couple that are just *ungodly painful*. Trap skills come to mind. I don't know if it's been improved but I feel like it'd easier to master assassinate than it is to get all trap skills to 100%. Probably a slight exaggeration but it keeps me from playing trapper thieves going forward.

I enjoy skill practice, for whatever reason, it's nice to see those improvements. And I like that list of 100's too, not for any mechanical advantage, since I suck at PK anyway, but just because it feels like it's done and not something to worry about.
Plus when you have a 100 the skill % doesn't drop when you berserk I think. :)

Many people are aware of bugs that can be used for certain skill practices, but far as I know, if you get caught, you're going to have a negative impact like having the skill % lowered or the skill removed. There's risk of death in the parting blow practice method, which is why I think that is different than say the evade methods people might use.

Not worth the risk in my opinion.

And you can perfect evade pretty painlessly with a lot of classes. Hell, I got it to 99 on a dwarf warrior in sub 100 hours.

>There's also a couple that are just *ungodly painful*. Trap
>skills come to mind. I don't know if it's been improved but I
>feel like it'd easier to master assassinate than it is to get
>all trap skills to 100%. Probably a slight exaggeration but
>it keeps me from playing trapper thieves going forward.

Just took a look and as far as I can tell all the trap skills are as easy to improve as skills can be.

Which, granted, is probably still effectively hard because you have to use ingredients to try, etc.

You need to use ingredients and under level 40(?) there's a timer before you can set another trap.

So you can do it like once every 5 ticks, assuming you have the ingredients. In this respect it's like mastering endure.

What I'd do is either make it so the effects don't care about the skill percentage (flatten out the effectiveness rate), or remove the timer. It's too unreliable to use at 75%-80% right now...you just wind up knocking your own group out. I don't want to power rank to 51 with no kills just to master traps...that isn't how I like to play characters.

> I don't want to power rank to 51 with no kills just to master
>traps...that isn't how I like to play characters.

I think this post covers it pretty well:

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=51300&mesg_id=51300&page=

I'm pretty sure it's not anyone's favorite thing that traps can't be efficiently mastered until after level 40 (unless trappers have taken to being totally invisible in game now). The actual trap skills (all their dusts and such) are really awesome and powerful. It's just traps themselves that are kinda meh because of a few things (ingredients being 1+ lbs each, limited ingredients, hard to perfect the skills, randomly knocking yourself out, etc).

There's a difference between major systems of the game (ABS, empowerment, skill learning) and "outliers". Most of the changes I've been successful in lobbying for have been outliers that don't really make much sense in the grand scheme of things.

And to my credit, I've lobbied a *LOT* of changes over the years because secretly Daevryn loves me in a no-gay sort of way.

However, you clearly did. Considering your first sentence.

Your time in the military rotted your critical thinking skills. I can agree with Daevryn without being naive enough to think he is talking literally about any possible scenario or permutation. If the latter was true, the game would never undergo any changes at all.

If I wanted to be a smartass I could enumerate a handful of things that, due to them either being obscure, unimportant, hard to avoid or overlooked don't fit the mold. But if I did that he'd be within his right to point out that I was missing the point by focusing on the trees instead of the forest.

The gag yet eludes you.

n/t

nt

So there's a few people who have legitly said they love it, and I do get enjoyment when I see the pretty "You got better!" text, but the main function of skills is to create investment in your character.

We don't want to basically hand out characters in peak form. You have to build up that way and skills is one of those ways, along with levelling, gear, empowerment, etc, etc. If we tuned it so basically everyone could perfect every skill with minimal effort and time...well then the whole system would cease to matter. Characters with more time and investment would lose a bit of their edge and appeal.

Are you going to a be a bit less effective if you roll up with lower skill %'s than some other person? Yeah. Will you be *ineffective*? No. Sure Nep's chars perfect stuff, but plenty well played killers have gotten by without it. Did they lose a few kills and die a few more times than they would have otherwise? Sure...but the longer they stick with it, the higher chances of them getting those 100%'s are.

I completely understand the sentiment of "I hate practicing skills, but I also hate the idea of playing a character that isn't always at peak efficency." While it's probably not as big a deal as you think? I'm also not going to tell you "No! You shouldn't feel that way!"

So we're at an impasse here. We *need* skill practice in for the purpose of creating that investment in a character. Making it too quick to zip to peak performance creates a much bigger throw away character environment. The part of this issue I'd like to ask is what would make skill practice more fun? The answer to this cannot on any level contain the phrase "Make it easier/quicker."

I don't know the answer but I'm certainly open to ideas. If you hate skill practice, but also hate not being at peak efficency, what would make practicing skills more fun without making it faster/easier? Go!

Nothing aggravates me more than getting skillups in useless things like haggle and detect invis.

We have skill learn now to loosely target a certain skill for gains.

Can we also have anti skill learn, so we can target AWAY from a few skills (3?). I don't want skillups in detect magic, detect invis, or haggle.

I think its indicative of a problem when I consider not practicing detect magic because I don't want skillups in it, and while nice, isn't vital to anything.

edit: Maybe you can either choose a skill learn target, or anti skill learn targets, but not both? I'd choose the latter every time.

There is not really a reason why detect invis would be as hard as it is to learn without randomly spamming it in your guild...
Which is really sad that I might actually consider it to get it out of the way.
It should be easily perfected just by casting it on yourself by level 10 if you cast when it falls every time.

There are a few spells like those that need adjusting. That and the defensive partial shifts for shapeshifter.

...I mentioned this above that...while I understand skill practice and enjoy it myself and get the whole investment side of things, can we also look at some of the "outliers"?

Example I gave was trap thieves, who are inordinately impacted by skill percentage.

If I have a low disarm percentage, I've got a pretty good chance of missing a disarm.

If I have a low directional trap percentage, I miss all the side effects from my traps, have a pretty good shot at it blowing up in my face *and* the skill doesn't work...plus there's two separate factors (ingredient cost/weight and hard coded timers) that make it difficult to learn.

Know what I mean?

Some outliers I'd look at is :

Traps
Poisons
Bindings
Animate Dead used to be in this list but I think it got improved?

There's a few other ones that come to mind but not as bad as those.

AD is spammable.

Reanimate and embalm are not, and require parts.

That's another good angle. While the skill system overall is here to stay you're right there definitely could be outlier skills that are in the red zone.

Again, no promises *at all* but I think that's a good discussion point on how to handle that kinda thing.

Using Edgepoints (or even practice sessions) to be able to boost above 75%?

Maybe 1 practice session = an extra 5% (over 75%). Make it that it can only be done when it's at 75% since getting from 75%-80% is easier than 95%-100%

Same theory with edge points - but maybe it could be done at any time (since people won't necessairily have edge points at lower ranks)

Make it so it still can't work on some skills (ie - assassinate)

>So there's a few people who have legitly said they love it,
>and I do get enjoyment when I see the pretty "You got better!"
>text, but the main function of skills is to create investment
>in your character.

Yup, it was more popular than I imagined. I thought most people tolerated it and a few people liked it a little, but apparently a good number of people really like it. Although I suspect that what they like is having the advantage over other people with less tolerance for boredom. If they could just click to improve their skills I doubt anyone would do it the labor-intensive way.

>So we're at an impasse here. We *need* skill practice in for
>the purpose of creating that investment in a character.

I disagree with this. My opinion is that you shouldn't, in a game, have to do un-fun things to get to the fun parts. It shouldn't be work, or a grind. The goal should be to have it be fun all the time. Obviously that's unachievable (most people don't like dying in PK, e.g.) but it can be worked towards.

We need investment, we don't need it to be based on chores. Investment can come in different ways. For example skills could improve only through character age (modified by int). You still get investment from having something you can't quickly replace.

But... people like skill practice.

I don't have a magic bullet here, but currently, the best way to practice skills, in terms of minimizing my unhappiness, is to go to a far corner of thera, interact with nobody, and run a bot. Not good for the game and not good for me.

Theoretically, we could have some kind of repeatable automated quest system that awards skill gains, has something to do with your character's goals, and brings you into contact with other players. But this would be a big coding and content effort, so I don't expect to happen in this decade.

I think we actually do agree since the thing I'm trying to solve is making that unfun grind turn into something you do find fun. I'm also saying that it needs to stay there as a form of investment, but I'm not saying it needs to stay as a boring grind. I guess the other option is we build another system that builds investment that is fun, however that's a much larger undertaking since we're scrapping a system that exists and while flawed, serves its purpose and creating a brand new mechanic to the game. Far more disruptive and far more likely to cause issues. Finding ways to adjust the existing system to be more fun is a more likely target, even though a wholesale magic bullet isn't likely, we're not going to stop examining the system and finding ways we can make it fun. There's been some good ideas thrown around in this thread. Focusing on some of the especially bad outliers and I like the age being a factor component as well. (Again, no promises on anything but these ideas I think bear discussion and seem like relatively smaller changes to the game)

We've also made some quality of life changes there already. Skill practice rates going up based on players online as well as those 2 hour super boost periods. The skill learn command to help focus level up skill boosts, etc. The skill system is far from perfect and it'll never truly make everyone happy but that doesn't mean we're not going to keep trying to make it better. However, and I hate to dash everyone's hopes, I can say with 100% certainty the skill system and how skills rise with use isn't ever going to go away.

some are a specific skill per quest (of which i think you should increase the learning from 3% to maybe 7% or even 10%), and some are for killing things

i like both

You could introduce smaller and more likely chunks of skill % improvement while retaining the overall expectation value of the improvement.

1 1% improvement, 2 0.5% improvements 5 0.2%improvements and 10 0.1% improvements instead of 4 1% improvements of the old or something similar for example. This particular scenario would give 18 improvements instead of just 4 in the same amount of tries on average. There would be less sense of stagnation due to constant improvements, even though skill practice would still take the same amount of time on average.

Dunno how viable this is, but it's a thought. Unsuccessful skill practice without improvements is the most tedious kind. You can reduce tedium by increasing the amount of successes during skill practice.

First off, I understand this would be a major undertaking.

Perhaps though only for the last 10% of a skill have 3 messages about getting better at it.
The fourth actually improves the %. This would cut down on the "randomly bad" skill learns.
Because you are spreading it out over 1/4 points instead of just a 1% skill learn.
It would feel less grindy and be less erratic. Certain skills would be affected less (assassinate & ancient instincts).
But skills like evade will seem less bad when they go up so slow. Learn from mistakes would have to be adjusted as well.
It might give you a full 1% learn instead of a 1-3% learn as it is now.
It gives you a lot more control over how long it might take to learn one skill over another.

Getting a message along the lines of, "You feel your skill in *skill* improve slightly."
Then when reaching the full % mark it gives you the normal skill improvement.
Skill improvement is almost too random the way it is.
On average I can have a skill not go up for hours or it will go up 9% in a short period of time from learning mistakes.
It is nuts and pretty frustrating sometimes.

A feeling of progress settles frustration for me.

If you make this change though, I would suggest making a way to turn off the additional messages for those who do not want more spam in their combat text.

Note: There would be no additional messages until 91%+. Even if you make the code do it for all skill % learns to work the same. Just to reduce spam on skill/spells/etc.

Immortals, including Implementors, are wrong at least as often as players are.

You can be wrong without the over an overexaggeration of low player counts and still be held accountable for not looking at both sides of an issue, and then still make the disingenuous claim that other players like the way it is as an excuse to avoid considering what the logins of the victims are like.

While many aspects of the game make CF what it is, in many more ways there are simple, viable changes that do not significantly change
Something a player enjoys, when it comes to exploration being wiki'd (make small tweaks to keep things things fresh without invalidating wiki's not large revamps to become huge chores) or PVP (Stop making players have to rely on their victims being idiots to get kills unless they can permalag or abuse cabal powers/mobility with niche counters, add an echo for bash/trip lag wearing off etc)

You cannot have anything resembling a competitive PvP balance when you can be rewarded for RP and vice versa. The circumstantial factors, including the time management of the players in question are too great. Tweak the balance accordingly but make the soft counters more effective without making the answer 'hide from your opponent or die due to RP'

You want PK to enhance RP specifically. I understand that, but advertise to that effect and freely announce when you are willing to forego competitive skill balance for RP and scale the game more often by playercounts, as you have XP and learning.


The way things are now, only a small handful of people get to enjoy RP like it's a novel. Dark Souls is one of many examples of games that handled this balance adequately and it still has room for dramatic improvement, CF does too.

Some people will agree with you. Some people think you're a moron for posting this.

Each to their own. That's the point. You cannot win them all and it's literally impossible to make everyone happy all the time.

Thanks for outlining your philosophy of "#### you i do what i want" to us so succinctly. That really helps smooth things over.

I believe the adage that both her and Daev are using here is.

"You can please all of the people some of the time,
you can please some of the people all of the time,
but you can't please all of the people all of the time."

Please see Arvam's post (bottom of page) about this unfair game. I like some of the unfairness of the game. I don't like the lag system because it forces people to use one or two moves even though they were handed so much more. I like some of the "rock paper scissors" of the game. I don't like the role-play enhanced PVP. and I wish it were the other way around - anyone who says it's the other way around has not paid attention to the evolution (if there even was one) of the game since inception. I like coming up with unique characters and role-playing them and wading into the pvp with such characters. I like writing descriptions that few will ever read. I like seeing other people's characters who put thought and time into making there character more than just a PVP robot that pretends to RP. There are many things I like and some things I don't like, but I'll not sink endless hours complaining about it on all the forums.

With this new implementation I'm looking at rolling an evil for the first time in a long time. That is a good thing. Am I pleased with everything? No, but I can say thank you to them for putting in their free time to do it.

In the end as I have said this before... This is a free game with a volunteer staff. If you are sinking your time into bitching about this game, you are wasting your time. There are thousands of games out there, there are millions of books and movies out there. There are people to meet in real life. CF is not the end of the world. Stop playing it if you don't like it. That is exactly what I will do/have done the minute I don't like it anymore.

P_N

The link:
http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=51202&mesg_id=51243&page=

That doesn't mean Hell and Silent should remain the rubix cube holy grail for explorers when there's far more important small changes to make, little improvements to test and generally more interesting things to be doing than adding areas. (Granted nobody has added an area in years, they have all been revamped to more current standards)

But older areas could always stand to have new gear and preps added over time. A level 45 scroll off Tiamat that casts two Ievel 60 duplicates of damnation, soften, earthbind or razor chain, energy drain, vamp touch and antipathy, or some kind of similar item to soft counter out of range PK without getting Ehren Lord would do wonders. Allowing thieves to use a skill in combination with gentlewalk to avoid gentle walking trial and error in older areas would be awesome too. Temporary Harmonious Equilibrium effects, giving antipathy to shamans or devils, letting AP's have an antipathy effect on ice control and other small tweaks along with extra polearms/daggers/flails/staffs and so forth.

Rayihn is well within her rights to say a lot of nasty crap to me in particular, but the converse to 'You can't please everyone all the time' is always 'But there are things it would take 10 minutes to implement that would go a long way toward getting the harshest critics to ease up.'

P.s. Gratz on the shaman revamp, though I have no particular opinion on the new skills one way or the other due to the current character not giving a fig about most empowerment classes.

>is always 'But there are things it
>would take 10 minutes to implement that would go a long way
>toward getting the harshest critics to ease up.'

Are you really missing the point entirely?

Which harshest critic should I be trying to please today? Because I guarantee you they don't all want the same things.

.

I'd argue there is not an even distribution amongst complaints. Replace harshest critic with "most common sources of complaints" and there's definitely some low hanging fruit there and some repeatable themes.

Empowerment - here the biggest beef people have from my novice observations is lack of responses for initial and full empowerment. This to me, seems like its fixable, without rewriting the entire system, by nailing people down on responding to out of game emails about empowerment if they want to have an active religion and generalizing the religions so they aren't so tightly tied to spheres and specific roleplay (at least for empowerment purposes if not tattoo purposes). Is anyone's favorite thing not getting a response?

ABS - nuff said IMHO. Balance by cheating doesn't really strike me as balanced. More now that the locations are almost google searchable and there's no real pretense of it being obscure anymore. If not for the fact that I'm not out to prove anything I'm really tempted to roll a scion invoker now that I have access to every wand location in the game without doing anything to earn it. Do we care about people whose favorite thing is finding their wands off a list so they can drop unspeak novas while taking injures worth of damage? Why would I not roll a mage if I have access to every ABS location?

Cabals - should get tweaked to be a little more generic. The outlander changes are good in this regard. Every align/ethos should have 1-2 solid choices that are relatively easy to get into, get full balanced powers, and boot as necessary. Who does this hurt? Tattoos serve the purpose of RP rewards.

Thieves - I think honestly lightening up some of the restrictions I've mentioned would help tons, they're barriers to entries into relatively well balanced paths. Again, not hurting anyone to improve some quality of life types of things.

Maybe I'm also missing the point but I really don't think it's that diverse a set of things people complain about and the things they complain about are really other people's favorites.

Seriously, did I bone your mother while pouring sugar in your gas tank or something? Because that escalated quickly.

It's "I mean, what's your encore? Do you anally rape my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank?"

Clerks FTW.

I've understood your truisms perfectly, and I'm a bad angry crazy person for not patting you on the back for it.

Whatever, dude.

No, I seriously have no idea what you're perpetually angry about.

I also cannot imagine being as worked up about any hobby as you seem to be.

You and Rayihn specifically are champions of the "play dumb and call the other person crazy" tactic. It's trolly #### and only works on gullible people. Give it up.

I'm not perpetually or even irrationally angry. And when I get done posting/playing - even when it's not all fun and games - I get on my bike and/or go to work and have a wonderful time.

It's just that what you call "worked up" I call "caring". You should try it sometime. CF is a wonderful game and should be protected.

Moving on - how am I supposed to feel when someone tells me it's their way or the highway? Isn't that what this thread is about? You reminding me (anyone who reads this thread) that you're going to do whatever you want to do.

I mean - firstly it's annoying that you feel you had to mention it - we're not stupid, everyone knows already that's how it works. Then my eyes are rolling out of my head that you think it's some kind of wisdom, as opposed to just trite and obtuse, and that the only acceptable replies are "amen, brutha". And I'm downright infuriated that you're playing dumb about the whole thing.

It's MY game - I'm 25 and I've been playing since I was 11. A lot of people feel the same way. And this thread is "we're volunteers and discourse with you a-holes doesn't matter". Am I not supposed to be angry about that? Am I not supposed to be angry about a PSA that completely discounts the volunteerism of the entirety of your remaining playerbase? Am I not supposed to be enraged by what amounts to a petty argument in favor of petty behavior? Isn't the implication "what we do is right (or maybe not whatever) and your opinion doesn't matter"?

Summarily, how are your statements NOT just flipping the bird to everyone who views this thread? It's not JUST bad administration - it's downright antisocial.

>Moving on - how am I supposed to feel when someone tells me
>it's their way or the highway? Isn't that what this thread is
>about? You reminding me (anyone who reads this thread) that
>you're going to do whatever you want to do.

No, that's not the point at all. I think you have to read the post wanting it to be something bad to find that.

>I mean - firstly it's annoying that you feel you had to
>mention it - we're not stupid, everyone knows already that's
>how it works.

What, that everyone knows that not everybody wants what they want is what everybody wants?

It's possible everybody does know that, but pretty much none of the most vocal players post as if they know it. It's usually that obviously I should know that deathblow is overpowered or everyone hates empowerment or everyone hates Heralds or everyone hates out of range healing or whatever the hell that person is ranting about.

And I have to believe you can't have missed that.

>It's MY game - I'm 25 and I've been playing since I was 11. A
>lot of people feel the same way. And this thread is "we're
>volunteers and discourse with you a-holes doesn't matter". Am
>I not supposed to be angry about that? Am I not supposed to be
>angry about a PSA that completely discounts the volunteerism
>of the entirety of your remaining playerbase? Am I not
>supposed to be enraged by what amounts to a petty argument in
>favor of petty behavior? Isn't the implication "what we do is
>right (or maybe not whatever) and your opinion doesn't
>matter"?

No, that's almost exactly the opposite of the actual message.

A single player ranting about their issue and what they think we would change if we weren't ####ed in the head is thinking of exactly what one player wants.

My job is to weigh what that player wants and what all the other players want and to try to make a good choice for all of us.

It's the polar opposite of not caring what you think.

>What, that everyone knows that not everybody wants what they
>want is what everybody wants?
>
>It's possible everybody does know that, but pretty much none
>of the most vocal players post as if they know it.
>It's usually that obviously I should know that
>deathblow is overpowered or everyone hates empowerment or
>everyone hates Heralds or everyone hates out of range healing
>or whatever the hell that person is ranting about.
>
>And I have to believe you can't have missed that.

>A single player ranting about their issue and what they think
>we would change if we weren't ####ed in the head is thinking
>of exactly what one player wants.
>
>My job is to weigh what that player wants and what all
>the other players want and to try to make a good choice for
>all of us.
>
>It's the polar opposite of not caring what you think.


Specifically - everyone knows that a staff is going to please itself first with the changes it makes. I know that's not what you wrote - it's a necessary ride-along.

The staff wants to have fun. The staff wants everyone to have fun and get what they want - but can't please everybody. If we can't please everybody, then we've got people to please and people to displease.

Your job description there is perfect in that it's entirely accurate, and I think it highlights the big gulf between what you're saying and what I'm hearing. Which is this: when the rubber meets the road, and the heaviest factor in a decision is "who to please" - I have to trust that each and every one of you is sticking to your job description. Please all of us.

Weighing all the possible options: "All" of us is correct but factually impossible. The best you can hope for is an approximation - a compromise. "Myself" is the abhorrent opposite, but a given if anyone is honest with himself. "Myself and the people I like to play with" is the cancer that kills communities - it's not a readily sustainable compromise.

Pardon me if my cup of benefit of the doubt is running kinda dry.

>Pardon me if my cup of benefit of the doubt is running kinda
>dry.

I'm not sure why I should.

Again, I feel like I somehow personally wronged you and have no idea what I've done to you that I should be understanding about this.

>Again, I feel like I somehow personally wronged you and have
>no idea what I've done to you that I should be understanding
>about this.

Maybe that's because you're standing in for your wife, again - see my first reply.

#### if either of us know what she did to you, either. :P

Well, since it involves active characters, and I still like the game, and still have a few ounces of good faith left, I can't really go into that detail publicly. We'll just have another rhetorical throwdown after that character dies, I guess.

Psych.

I'm amped with this shaman revamp. Will keep me occupied for the next 6 months or so.

NOW, to figure out an evil imm to seek empowerment from...

Anyway there's always things that are kinda messed up, ABS being one of them. BUT, on the bright side, there's enough enjoyment from everything else to minimize the impact of a couple of bad things.

Btw, what is this thread in reference to? Were there threads deleted that I missed?

>Btw, what is this thread in reference to? Were there threads
>deleted that I missed?

Just a recurring observation really. Some people think that the thing that pisses them, specifically, off is something that pisses all or even most of the players off and I must have no regard for the players opinions to not address it right away.

But I feel like the slightest bit of perception would show otherwise.

For example:

You hate empowerment and can't stand that we just did more stuff for an empowered class? Somebody else loves the #### out of empowerment characters and plays them exclusively.

You hate ranking? Somebody else enjoys it.

You hate the randomness of shifter forms? That's the reason someone else can't stop playing the class and loves it.

You hate deathblow? A lot of people love playing battle berserker or fighting against battle berserker.

And it goes on and on.

That's not to say there aren't changes that can be made that most people will like, it's just to point out that there legitimately is no making everyone happy and any call to listen to what the players want can only really have a reasonable response of, "Okay, which ones?"

Stop playing one and start being one, damn it!

I agree with what you say for the most part.

I just want to put it out there that certain people like things for the wrong reasons, and those should not be as respected.

Griefing is one such reason. I do not believe that if you just REALLY love griefing just to make some newbie's life hard, your love of doing so should be respected.

This does not mean, however, that anything that causes grief is necessarily griefing. I don't think, for example, killing you and turning off corpse guard is griefing. I may just believe in gear flow.

But something I would consider griefing is if I (or me and a friend), roll up a summoner, get lvl 20, and just c summon mercenaries and zombies from out of range people all day. They gain nothing but knowing they screwed you over.

(I really hate out of range summoning. argh.)

I don't understand why you think only a "small handful" of players have this option.

An interesting story arc is available to every single one of us.

The problem, as I see it, is that people decide what "must" happen to make their character a success, then delete if this does not seem to be the way things are shaping up.

This is sort of like deciding that you want to be the starting Center Fielder for the Boston Red Sox when you're ten years old and then committing suicide after high school because you didn't get drafted at age 18.

It's about adjusting your expectations and rolling with the punches. Maybe you were thinking that your level 15 dwarf was going to go Maran when all of a sudden you became Commander of Battle. Did that screw up your "plans?" Sure did. Is it something to delete over? Hell no.

And that's just an extreme example.

Long arcing novelesque roleplay is available to all of us, and if you need an IMM to make that happen for you, you're probably doing it wrong. Go out and make it happen for yourself and everything else should fall into place.

n/t

I can't recall an instance since Mayesha where I've warmed up enough to an that imm to play a role that needed one for detailed RP.

There's far better venues and narratives to create and drop in much shorter and longer spans of time. I've seen them, participated in them, and am unlikely to cease doing so. For example, despite looking like a gigantic decade long scam to get their players to write a Wheel of Time plot for them and using gigs if logs as an editing room cutting floor, Firan is still leagues beyond CF's RP in just handing players an average schmuck. I am not presenting it as a grass is greener type thing but a 'Here are some examples' because CF staff usually only imm if they are allowed to toy with ideas like a cat before implementation.

Conversely, for PK, immstaff tend to be in the habit of 'managing customer expectations' rather than brainstorming a balance concept for feedback. They'll read feedback but are in the habit of avoiding discussion before it's actually in, to avoid hurt feelings and burnout. There were many many years pre-2010 where there were no other places to draw inspiration for PvP from before. Now there are in the last three years alone.

If you want to be RP focused, great. Close a few cabals, tweak existing areas to add more lore surrounding the remaining ones whether it's implementing non-con dead non-age death players from years ago doing heroic or devious things with nifty gear, and use mob-controlled global events to harshly nudge excessively strong cabals. Then reward every participant with 250 xp even if it was just standing around being one shotted. Have imms multichar as arbitrarily levelled PC's, and offer pre-written character/class combinations for people to play drawn out of a hat with a set of flaws and edges.

If you want to do PvP, clean up air/off more, put in counters to dam redux that dont (No one wants dispellable A/B/S so the only other legit hard counter is -max HP effects like iceneedles, stackable and tacked on specs like axe, pole, and spear.) Make a wider variety of competitive options for people with less time on their hands besides the RNG absurdity of shifters and berserker ragers. Explain movement lag better, how to decrease it, how to increase it, and create more options for PvP besides 'cat and mouse' play and 'one sided roflstomp whoever has the most healers/assassins wins' cabal dynamics.

None of these things are worth quitting the game over, and player abuse of people getting tattoos and I'm XP from folks sucking up to the most freely available imms will always be a thing. But consistency and separating group vs. Group and 1v1 combat doesn't need to ruin player's confidence in a level playing field, which is the case right now.

You cannot and should not have both though. It creates balance problems and bad blood in an inherently hyper competitive playerbase. This is why I make briefing abuse if Racers and Fort a hobby or three months out of the year and still try to give evil newbies tidbits when Outtie camp summon gangs walk over their face repeatedly.

A novel has set points in a story that need to happen. It's not flexible. The nature of RP has vastly more in common with improvisational acting than it does narrative writing.

Perhaps there's been overemphasis on the role command, but the basic driver behind RP is you come up with a character concept. Here is why they are the way they are and what their desires are and some of their quirks and ticks. After that? Roll with the punches and 'grow' based on your interactions in game. There's no set story, nothing that needs to happen. The coolest characters change based on in game things. Aster after his Hell experience decided too much obsession on material possessions was a problem and afterwards only wore this super basic crap set of gear. Stuff like that? That's awesome. Everything about that happened in game as a result of stuff and interactions that happened in game. That's the kinda RP that I love to see.

If you have a role about finding a long lost father? Think about how that makes you interact with everyone. It shouldn't ever be part of the character concept to find said father, but just serve as an explanation about why a character is always acting a certain way in a given situation. On occasion yeah an IMM might pick up and run with that story for you, but it might not happen.

When you RP, you're not writing a story, you're engaging in improv with other players. It's nobody's story, the story is created by the character concept you built and seeing how that reacts to other people's concept. The story brews from that on top of the world CF is and the nature of it. There's a huge variety of goals players can have, and those goals all interwine in neat ways and the stories arise from that plus player's own creativity about "WHY" someone would want those goals and how they go to achieve it.

I have no words.

Thank you sir.

This is, to a tee, 100%, what I feel like RP should be. It's a pet peeve of mine where people want to know like, what my step by step story is going to be. I'm not writing a story. There's a backstory that got me here, there's some traits and beliefs I have and everything else should be me trying to react to the world I'm in. It's improv. It's you're an elf and an orc is trying to eat your face, 'What do you do?' Something inherited very much from traditional D&D.

This is also why :

1) I don't really care for spheres insomuch is how they immediately tie or exclude you to/from a patron.

2) I really dislike being asked my "goals" during a cabal interview. Some of my characters are grandly ambitious with specific goals...most have *beliefs* and are reacting to those beliefs, without necessarily having an "end game" set out at the age of 17.

3) I find it in really poor taste to be an "on/off" RP'er where you're only RP'ing in the presence of an Imm/specific person.

4) I don't like cabals/religions that have such *specific* beliefs that I feel like I can't play two different human followers of said beliefs/cabal without them coming across as identical. "Be honorable" as a religion, to me, is much better (and more flexible) than "You believe that the great Faerie Sheeto gives presents to everyone who taps the floor 3 times after killing someone." I kinda have this problem with Maran because I feel the style of RP that gets you the Maran powers really takes away your creativity in playing different types of characters. It'd be nice to be a 'flawed' Maran, if not in a power-gamey sort of way. Maybe, for instance, my character doesn't see much value in trying to preach to the wicked.

5) I feel like the 'unique' requirement for role contests (and the general power boost from winning an RC) somewhat counter productive. Or at least, I feel like *my* personal goal is not to be the most unique sphere honor paladin you've ever seen but to really bring a sphere honor paladin to life in your eyes and make you feel like you're really interacting with a sphere honor paladin. I play "archtypes" but I try to bring them to life, like that's my entire goal, but that isn't the same as envisioning a elven lich lord Quesalthas that conspired with the orc gods to birth me or whatever. One is fantasy writing (which is valid and cool) and the other is roleplay.

Yup. We are. We will continue to be. We'll still screw stuff up and try to fix it. However fixing a problem might not be the same solution the players had in mind.

There was a really great writeup on user experience testing Gearbox did with regards to the Borderlands games and how they chose to respond to it. One of the common complaints was that the first skag fight in the game there were too many skags and it frustrated players. What was their response? They doubled the number of skags in that fight. Next series of tests? Everyone loved it.

Another common complaint was that the movement speed was too slow. Their fix? Add in a lot more props, shrubs and grass extras. Populate the world more.

It's something we need to think about devside. If the playerbase says "Hey, we think this a problem" or "The game would be more fun if..." We gotta analyze that more. If people say that stuff we aren't going to ignore it, but we aren't going to rush to make a bunch of brash changes. We need to dig deeper to see what the problem is and if there is one. Since sometimes the unfortunate truth is we will make some decisions that some folks won't think are fun. It's like Nep said. Person X will love this one feature, person Y will hate it. We need to dig into why they feel that way about it and see if there's a way to reconcile that. Sometimes there will. Sometimes there won't. Sometimes there will but it will be extremely risky to pull off and we might not have the staff to make it happen.

We have to be careful about what we do to the game. While we can recognize "System X isn't the best idea", we need to make sure that if we make a change or replace, the end result is overall a better experience. It would be *very* easy to make a change on a whim and screw a buncha #### up because we didn't take some time to follow the impact and what other systems interconnect. It might seem like it takes a longass time to make what are essentially small balance changes, but even small tweaks can really have longterm impact since some of these 'small' changes happen at a very base level of the game that affects nearly everything.

To your comment about small quality of life tweaks, I actually agree. Oddly some 'small' things are larger projects than one would expect but I do think in addition to large content drops (Shaman revamp) having smaller quality of life changes is important. (We've been doing this. IE: The balance changes to mace specs, how pks are counted from bad teleports, etc) We're going to continue to do it and honestly if we were going to list out every single small tweak we could make to the game? The list would be huge. We don't have the manpower to do it all and like above, we want to make sure they're the *right* changes to make. We want to make sure we're adjusting our existing content as well as making sure we get new, fun shiny stuff in there too. This means that while we focus on getting the shaman stuff right, we might not have the bandwidth to play with some of the smaller things. It's not they're getting ignored, we just want to make sure the new content doesn't completely break the game.

On a more broader note about game balance is that it's incredibly tricky to balance given the experience we want to give here. We are going for a hugely asymmetric attempt at game balance. We want our players to have vastly different abilities, options and playstyles. Look at what's going on over in the WoW community. Years ago the players were complaining a red streak over certain classes being benched in scenarios because of the imbalance and numbers discrepency between classes. Now everyone is complaining everything is too homogenized and everything is like everything else. Blizzard is trying to do something extremely difficult in satisfying players desire to have the class experience they have be competitive with everyone else, while still making each experience feel unique. That's not easy and Blizzard has certainly made a few missteps, but I honestly really have a lot of respect with the effort they put into things. The easy way to make things balanced? Make things behave in a similar manner. We could make the game super balanced if we gave every class in the game very similar abilities. We're not going to do that, but that means the game as it stands is going to be a ####load harder to keep balanced. It's not perfect, it won't ever be and we have to be careful about reacting to the flavor of the month, or reacting to a situation because a good player wrecks house on a particular combo, and then we see a flood of me-too characters completely fail to do the same.

This is the balance beam we're trying to tread here. We want to offer a variety of vastly different play experiences between classes, races and cabals. We also want to make sure nobody has the 'I win' button. We also go more for the rock, paper scissors balance approach, except instead of classic, it's more like RPS-25 given our class count and customization within the classes. There shouldn't be the class that dominates all of them. There should always be a couple combos you gotta think harder to defeat. Or some other aspect that is tricky. Defense spec shifter you should be able to survive a lot of stuff, but it's gonna be harder for you to seal those kills. That healer isn't all that scary but pair him with one or two people and suddenly it's a huge force to be reckoned with. I'm okay with situations like that. It creates those fun moments where you're sitting there trying to figure out how to crack this combo. The situation you're up against constantly changes and it's never balanced. Is it frustrating at times? Sure...but those times when you pull off the coup and win against the odds? Those are moments you just can't find elsewhere. ...so in a sense we're trying to keep an innately unbalanced game fun. That ain't easy. (Note: I'm not asking for sympathy from the players on this at all. This is just an explanation on one of the many reasons why we move slow to change things or why we 'don't listen')

To the point about competitive PK balance and RP. I addressed that in the other post about fairness. CF isn't fair. The imbalance there is part of it. CF *is* imbalanced in that regard and it always will be. As I said the vast majority of games try for that tight balanced experience where the only thing separating players is skill. That isn't the case here. A player can get a unique reward that gives them some extra juice. Those characters are rare, but they stand out and make for memorable CF moments. We can do that since unlike other games where your character never dies...they will here. Nobody lives forever. So even if certain people get overpowered? Eventually? They'll go away. This is something we want to continue offering in our game and something that makes our game unique.

Also as I mentioned there we *should* work towards making sure those rewards aren't in the game breaking realm. It's another fine balance. We don't want the rewards to be boring and not cause a stir. We want them to have impact, but we don't want them to have impact to the point that nobody can do #### against them. A warrior with a third legacy doesn't suddenly become unbeatable because of that legacy. Some of the rewards of the past? Yeah they treaded there pretty seriously. A quest skill like executioner's grace is a pretty big deal. Some quest forms can definitely tread in that realm too if we're not careful.

Anyway, at the end of the day there are a lot of things we can do to make CF better and things we'll look at. IE: Your point about making landing kills easier. That's a pretty huge change to the game is we suddenly decide to turn some dials to make killing easier. Would it be more fun? Would it be a net benefit to the game? We gotta talk about that. I'm sure some people would disagree. Hell I bet if we brought that up to the staff right now *WE* would disagree on what the course of action would be there and if one was needed at all. At the end of the day? We'll make a call that we think is right. Will it be right? Who knows. That's a simple change, but a change to a *very* low level system and will impact a ton of aspects of the game. That's a huge example of a simple tweak that we really need to be careful about.

The staff needs the players and the players need the staff. It's a tricky balance and I don't want to encourage any sort of 'us vs them' mentality. We're going to continue to make choices that people are gonna hate. We're gonna do some stuff some folks will love. However I can guarantee we're not going to do anything to 'spite' someone or to #### someone over. The playerbase is smaller for any number of reasons, but if nobody plays? The game goes away. If the staff walk away? The game goes away. We want to keep the playerbase satisfied and hopefully make the content more engaging to get some folks into this. I think there's a lot of untapped gamers out there bored as #### with the cookie cutter hyper-watered down ultra balance experiences modern MMO's offer. For folks will to get their hands dirty on some old school 'tough' mechanics, CF has a lot to offer. We just need to make sure we keep the 'grit' of the game while still make it more and more approachable. Again, another tough thing to balance. How to make the game approachable, while still keeping the more hardcore aspects that make CF what it is.

Anyway. I just wanted to give some insight on why we work the way we do and why sometimes it feels like the popular opinion gets ignored or we're turning a cold shoulder. When possible I'll be transparent about some stuff, but I don't ever want to say something that gets people's hopes up for changes incoming. IE: If anyone walks away from this post hopeful on any particular change? Kill the hopes. This was mostly a discussion about process and how we consider things. :) Not to say some of the above won't be discussed at some point.

arvam. such a fun mortal, was fun hanging out with you on irc :O

Thank you for taking the time to write all this.

My favorite thing about CF is halflings. So how about you try pleasing the Matrik for once? You will be richly rewarded with the spiritual boon of having an honorary position amongst the Matrikian Order.

Pixies are close enough. They're like half-sized halflings* and they sparkle like vampires.

*(Minus the flocculent feet and smoking addiction, of course.)

Flocculent feet and smoking addictions are the primary draw of the halflings :(.

However, I'll thank you for teaching me a new word. Consider your Soul saved and the Matrikian Order at your disposal.

Daevryn's membership on the other hand is still pending the creation of PC halflings.

I like any PC race that doesn't involve me coding them. :P

.

Quidni?

How serious am I is the question

CF is enough of a circus already, why add such a stupid race?

Rather than stupid, I imagine them having medium to high intelligence anyway.

It's a hardass dark fantasy game. Please, leave pixies to Terry Pratchett's works.

Probably even longer than you've been here.

nt

Besides, they might just leave pixie corpses.

If pixies can be evil I'll probably play one.

Orcs need someone new besides gnomes to get those sexy Punt kills on.

please make some seasonal snakes!! this is my idea from a few years ago, i'm sure you guys could do it justice/make more awesome



The Forsaken(VIP) < PM >
April 06, 2010 10:26AM
Moderator
Registered: 5 years ago
Posts: 4,374
Lower body of snake, upper body of human. Different type of snakes from different areas have different align and abilities. Most can regenerate. Can learn specific classes depending on type of snake. Magical history, can't be ragers.

Black mamba - desert oriented, resists heat, regenerates faster in the desert, very agile and powerful fang attacks. Warrior, assassin but doesn't learn kicks, bedouin ranger, transmuter, invoker paths of air, fire, ooze, lightning, shaman, blah blah blah

Pit viper - cave oriented, inherent camo/ambush, can see camo/hidden in caves, agile, warrior, forest or cave ranger, no rebounding strike, assassin but no kicks, shapeshifter but no air or water, transmuter, conjie but can't summon archons/angels/devils/demons, necromancer but no undead

Python - swamp and freshwater oriented, squeeze to knock unconscious, roll to prevent some martial attacks, vuln mental, slow, strong, wields two handed weapons, no regeneration, warrior, shaman, paladin, druid

Rattlesnake - plains and cities, dangersense makes tail rattle, can hear in same room, can't throw, vuln cold, thief, warrior, shaman, invoker paths of air, earth, fire, water, lightning, healer, transmuter

Could easily come up with a few more. Change the names of the snake to make them more magical/mythical to CF. Rare like minotaurs (but not -that- rare). Some snakes hate each other and will always autoattack. Gotta run to lunch, fun fun.

Not that I expect to see them anytime soon but...I love the snake ideas :D

Please say these are creepy-evil vampires and not Twilight-teenlove vamps!

All they do is run around yelling "Sam! Saaam! Froooodo!" in suggestive homoerotic tones.

Of course, you may be just dying to RP that. I just don't want to see it, man. Seriously.

Clearly you have never heard of Regis "Rumblebelly"

All they do is run around yelling "Sam! Saaam! Froooodo!" in suggestive homoerotic tones.

Of course, you may be just dying to RP that. I just don't want to see it, man. Seriously.

nt