I wanted to make a post where staff and players could have a good, illuminating discussion about the past/present/future of CF and how we all can improve. I'll be posting what I think are great talking points in subthreads under this (such as "What is the biggest issue facing CF" and questions like that).

I would appreciate if people took this relatively seriously and gave honest, truthful answers.

Mine would be the culture of entitlement that CF has created in the last 4 years.

Originally, when I started playing, having a title, or an extra legacy, or a quest form...these things were considered rare. So when you accomplished any of these events, it actually felt like you succeeded in a goal you set for the character.

However, I've noticed now (and I discussed my thoughts about the whole cultural impacts months ago) that players seem like if they don't break character and play 200 hrs, they SHOULD get all of these things. It doesn't matter if there are not a particularly well-roleplayed or high-profile character, they expect these "rewards".

So now you have a system where the "rewards" are expected....and now you honestly have NO REWARDS. And it's a shame. Now if I roll a shifter, join a cabal, don't break RP, and last over 200 hrs, I'm expecting a quest form and I'm more than likely going to be upset if I don't get one. And that's defeating the spirit of "rewarding" people.

The game is very inconsistent. That is a real downer for me. It makes it really hard to plan things and do things. There are some roles I just cannot play because I don't believe I can consistently get in touch with a particular imm of a religion I want or sphere I want to work with or a cabal that is just overtly more painful than another cabal to deal with.

I'm reasonably sure, for instance, today I will have an easier time getting a leadership position in Empire, Outlander or Scion than I would have getting a Maran position in Maran - because being a Maran requires this specific RP that I'm just not feeling right now and I hate cookie cutters. I want to do my spin on something. I like simple concepts that give me flexibility. I really hate very, very specific concepts that force me to roll Paladin #732 to have a reasonable chance of completing my character goals if those goals include tattoo and cabal membership.

The beauty of this game is that it changes. If you really want to create a cool character that you think won't get Maran, then just play it and deal without being Maran. If you put your heart into it, you never know what could happen. This very post feels like the entitlement problem spoken about above.

...uncaballed goodies who hunt evils.

Am I not strong enough to get roughed up and con die over a role choice? Yes, I'm not. Not right now anyway. It is an entitlement issue, I feel like good aligned killer-types are entitled to a cabal option. Just like mage haters or city haters or ranger haters and so on and so forth.

I want to play a role but I also don't want that role to be more painful than other options because I'm not a masochist.

There is some level of reasonable entitlement. I feel entitled to know that I'm the only person playing my character. Entitled that no one is "out to get me" on the Imm staff. Entitled that I be able to achieve certain things in game, like leveling, like spamming up my skills, so on and so forth. To me the difference between entitlement and reasonable expectations is probably a matter of perspective but I've never really viewed it like cabals are optional things you're not entitled to. They're there to be played. It's a key "feature" of the game. And you could say that we as players are not entitled to cabals and that they could be closed right away or made much stricter - but - who benefits from that anyway?

Things should be relatively consistent. Consistent like, if I want to play X combo and it's not allowed in game - if other people are allowed to play that combo there's some consistent way I can achieve the same. There's a reason why that consistency should exist, because if not, you're going to turn away players for no reason at all. It inhibits the game, it doesn't further it. It causes people to 'bandwagon' to the easiest route to 'success' because people are smart and they know that no matter how non-fun Jaguar shaman #38 is, it's better than playing an un-empowered shaman.

I don't know how much uncaballed playing you have done, but I can tell you it's a lot of fun and not as tough as you seem to think it is. Lack of a cabal channel hurts, but you also don't ever have to be where your enemy expects you. No cabal defending, retrieving, answering "door knocks," etc.

Plus, you don't have to cookie cutter yourself up, and you seem to hate that part of cabals like I do.

Play uncaballed with me, roleplay your ass off, kill your enemy's ass off. I promise, it can be very fun. You get a lot more cross-cabal dynamics looking for allies that way too. Far more interesting personal conflicts too, since you aren't on a clearly defined team and your allies/enemies probably are.

Your score probably matters too much to you to sacrifice cabal powers, but I guarantee you will have more fun than you think. Especially if you are looking to play a unique role and do it well.

At the very least, your number of deaths will be lower as uncaballed, I'd wager.

I've done un-caballed evil a million times. But for me, good aligned roleplay just doesn't work as a lone wolf. You're probably right that if my goal was survival, then surviving un-caballed is easy. That's rarely my goal when I play good aligned though, usually I'm a killer-type that wants to be out there fighting the good fight and dying but I also want allies and cabal channels and I don't want to be looked down upon as a lowly squire.

That's a very, very specific example but that sort of lack of consistency goes far beyond just that. Sometimes you do stuff and it's easy. Sometimes its like pulling teeth. And that's because there's a lot of arbitrary stuff or stuff that relies on you hooking up with someone who only plays 2 hours a month. A different notable example is village applicants before the rites were run. It went from being something where you'd see a village applicant for weeks upon weeks to them getting inducted in 24 hours.

For people who don't play, but insist on hanging around the forums.

nothing to see here.

It won't happen, ever, but the question wasn't "What's one REALISTIC thing you could change about CF."

A lot of things. I'm not sure one specific thing comes to mind.

I do think we put too much emphasis on equipment, edges, preps, and things like that. I don't think you have to be a power gamer or invest a lot of time to enjoy CF, but you probably do in order to be competitive in certain regards.

The size of the player base. A number of problems discussed could be alleviated by this.

It would be fun to see more than one Orc clan or to have enough characters milling about that an extra cabal or two wouldn't be detrimental.

Would make the playerbase congregate into more areas and you would get back the true raids of big sizes.

Maybe...

Tribunal + Empire,
Fortress + Goodie Outlanders,
Nexus + Neutral Outlanders,
Scion + Evil outlanders.

Leave Villagers alone, Orcs alone, and bring back Scarab!

I'd like for everyone involved in the game to be ####s to each other less often (OOC - if you're playing a truly ####ish villain and it isn't the case that damn near all your characters attempt to be truly ####ish villains, and you know who you are, have at it) and to have a little humility more often.

And that's not to say that there isn't a certain amount of luck of the draw or inconsistency of outcomes. There certainly is.

But when another player gets something nice you didn't or achieves something you couldn't, your default assumption should be that in some way they outshined or outplayed you. You should take it as a challenge to RP harder or better or PK smarter or more aggressively or whatever, or to play a long-lived character for once, or whatever. Not to accuse them of cheating, poor RP, trigger use, OOC connections, or whatever. Because even if you're right, it's a dead end of a conclusion -- it leaves you nowhere to go to improve yourself.

In general, give more credit to the good play of others for things that go your way, and less blame to the bad play of others for things that don't go your way.

Most players aren't terrible about any of these things, but all of us (myself included) have room for improvement.

They are few and far between as of late I've noticed, but those that are really break my fun stick.

I take deaths like the best of them but when I run into a wall of no RP... I just grumble and log off looking to a new fun stick.

I'd change something that created more incentive for players to take risks and die. To put themselves in situations and not flee/teleport the instant things turn bad. Since right now? Well...I mean it's smart play. I love a 190 and 80 character more than any 120 and 5 character.

I have no bright ideas here, but I'd love it if there was something in play that really made people want to stick out fights until the end, to roll the dice and say "#### it I'm going back in" even if they're at 20% hps and their foe is at 80%.

...again, no bright ideas here. :)

I don't think the concepts are hard how to fix this, but a lot of my personal ideas for forcing more fights would break so much tradition that they would never fly.

1. Remove get all corpse, add lag when removing armor from a corpse that they were wearing (You are trying to undress a limp body, it's not super fast).

2. After teleporting or wording, cause a massive disorientation to lag the character out for several hours (or if combat is started, several rounds) and give them potential dizziness on the directions they move for a few hours after. Make these effects compound the more you teleport/word, and make subsequent teleport/words have chances to fail from being so sick. (Yes, similar to the flaw.)

3. Tweak all cabal inners to scale with the amount of aggressors so that a single person of any build can over time take down an inner and take an item. Cabals Inners that can face a lot of people (like Outlander) would only start flinging around the brutal communes/spells/etc. (like Insects) after 2 or 3 aggressors.

As I said, everyone would throw a fit over these but they would make the cost of dying less, the ease of fleeing worse, and the motivation for smaller cabal battles higher.

nt

This is very much a case where you can selectively choose any of them and it could potentially make a difference.

The first is just to promote fights that people are avoiding because there is too large a chance that they will lose and they don't want to spend time regearing. I know it was unlikely to be popular.

There was no 'get all corpse' on PC corpses, and *gasp* no recalling when adrenalin was up (teleport was okay, because teleport carries the risk of sudden mob death)

It could work like the experience bonuses... But instead it generates unmitigated player vs player combat? Might be an interesting experiment.

Some players want transparency. There is some but not enough for many. Why? Because every imm knows that a piece of the magic is destroyed when you know things from a builder's aspect. And every imm has to go through the builder's side. The coders and game balance imms who have to do the reviews of new areas and create the special progs for an area have to be even more vague. As an imm and a player, it is much better for the unknown to occur. It makes the reward much more fulfilling.

It's UNFAIR. I only want to play if I have a Win button.

A) Removing Masters was the biggest mistake in my opinion.

B) Revert it back to the old difficulty in levelling. Make actually getting to hero a challenge again. Don't cap -xp from mob deaths, don't have bonus learning. Sure there are fewer players, but it is still far too easy.

Seeing as Sam asked how much faith we've all got in the staff... How does the staff feel about player habits they may have noticed over time? Or anything that you see as a negative trend that puts you off interacting with or watching a character.

In essence, I'm wondering if there's any faith amongst the staff that people still enjoy their game?

I wish people left their comfort zone more often (a problem I somewhat had), play that combo you think is OP.

I wish players were more trusting. I'm not sure how they can get there though. I wish more players were more social and civil to each other on the forums mainly because like it or not it affects the in-game culture.

It's definitely tough to keep the faith sometimes. It seems like it takes 10 (or 100, or 1000) positive comments to overturn one negative one. This isn't just true for CF btw, I'd say it's true about real life (possibly moreso). Example - I bet if you think for 60 seconds about something hurtful that someone said/did to you in high school, you won't have much trouble coming up with something (or several somethings).

Now try to remember nice things that someone said to you last month.


That being said, this isn't a fish for forum compliments. As I said, it takes way too many of them to counterbalance negativity. Rather, put that energy into playing CF, enjoying it, and showing that you enjoy it (by RPing and participating).

nt

Fail to look beyond their own particular in-game biases when they form an opinion.

People tend to frame their opinions based on their limited experience.

Often I find myself looking at player posts and wishing they would actually test the class that they are calling too powerful before they post an opinion.

For a long time I hated a particular cabal's players and I refused to play it. I took a hiatus from CF and when I came back I wanted to do something completely outrageous and step outside my comfort zone. I decided to play the cabal and now it is one of my favorite cabals in the game.

There's no build up, no banter - somebody sees you on where and they bring out their crystal encrusted shaft or bash or flyto or whatever, then leave without a word. It's such wasted potential. I haven't even bothered writing roles lately because nobody wants to roleplay, they just want the +1.

This was directed at the staff maybe, but honestly the playerbase needs to stop blaming the staff for its own shortcomings. It's not an imms fault that those guys just ganged you and left without a word.

With the numbers as they are it's a necessity.

When my range is best described as "one guy I can harm and the other guy I can also harm but who is likely to splatter me flat"... I'm not going to miss a PK opportunity against that one weaker guy I can kill.

If I had 20 people in my range, I could RP with them more, without fear that if I pass that one PK I'm going to spend 3 hours again fruitlessly waiting for someone I can fight.

I'm sure people still enjoy the game; you'd be hard-pressed to demonstrate that based on the forums, however. (Which is, no doubt, why I find myself not often wanting to discuss the game.)

Daev brought this one up, but just...being a #### towards others and other players. If you do outright asshole'ish things to other players in this game as a player? People aren't gonna want to play.

Hell that is single handedly why I can't stand playing public games of LoL. The community in that game is awful. It makes the CF community look like pristine saints. (Also, I don't think the CF community is bad honestly. Sometimes things get angry and poisonous but having spent some time doing community management for other games, this is nothing. I think the people we have are passionate about this game, and sometimes when you're passionate about something, you get angry. So in a roundabout way when I see someone raging out about something? Yeah I'd rather that be cooled off and in a more measured tone...it's good to see this place still inspires that.)

Aside from the few who try to play a conspiracy or superiority card, I think this playerbase is diverse enough to keep things interesting. Same thing goes for the staff. And when the players understand that, acceptance will be much easier for those conspiracy and superiority types.

Scarab and Twist already mentioned things that bother me more, so I'll take a moment to talk about an aspect of being an Imm that I believe sometimes isn't kept in the back of players' heads: it takes a lot of time to do a good job as an Immortal.

If you're thinking of rewarding or punishing a player, you need to go through and read their role to try and understand their comments and actions in the context of the character. You also need to have a basic understanding of the characters they are interacting with. You need to spend some time watching them to see if whatever you are scrutinizing is typical of the character or an anomaly. You probably want to talk to other Imms and see what they think of the character or the situation. You need to do some background checking and match your reward or punishment to other characters of similar caliber. For most of the Immortals doing a lot of interaction with the characters, we need one of a few higher level immortals to be online to actually give the rewards or look up logs for us or help us figure out why a prog/skill/quest is working the way it is. They also need to agree with us that the character deserves it. Then we actually need to do the immteraction. Hopefully we'll even remember to put something the character's history at the conclusion to inform other immortals or the playerbase in a PBF.

All of that happens while you are answering questions on the newbie channel, hearing prays about how unfair the game is, your cabal is chattering, and your followers are living their lives. The amount of information buzzing past your eyes can really be overwhelming if you're trying to concentrate on one thing.

Then we all have our real lives, and we're trying to squeeze in an interaction or watch someone while we're making arepas. Then we have our "constructive" mud projects of coding new skills, working on new areas, races, etc.

Rewarding/punishing promptly is best for letting players know what they're doing right or wrong, and it's frustrating for everyone involved when there's no cabal leader, but it really takes a lot of time to extrapolate from the little bits of data and glimpses into a character's life that we have and treat them in a way that fairly acknowledges their character in relation to others in a consistent way across the mud. Certainly more than half the time I want to interact with a character, they've logged off or the moment has clearly passed by the time I feel like I know enough to make a fair decision about something.

So, some patience, and a little bit of understanding when we make the wrong call because we haven't actually been able to watch everything like arepa-crafting gods, please?

...usually because of some complaint. A lot of the nonsense I've seen in logs should have and _could have_ been resolved in-game. I guess that, for some people, it takes a lot less effort to copy/paste a defamatory log rather than take the time to play.

There are a lot of former players that like to sit on the sideline and spout vitriol about the game. Many of these guys played some pretty great characters back in the day. It would be awesome if that effort was expended productively by PLAYING. Win-win situation for everyone!

And I'm going to do my best to answer these as time permits.

I have a good amount. Look, I'm not going to lie and say that 8 out of my favorite 10 IMMs haven't left in the last 6 years.

I'm also not going to say losing Zulg wasn't a titanic deathblow to CF.

However, all of the current IMMs love CF. They want to see it survive, and really, that's the most important thing.

So I'd say my faith level is around 70 in a scale of 1 to 100.

Not a fault of their own. Putting faith in them is like putting faith that the crew on the Titanic will mend the hole caused by the iceberg.

CF is the ship and the players are the iceberg.

I have faith that they want to do the job/hobby(whatever you call it, it's still work on some level), or else they would have stopped doing it long ago.

I know if I wanted to invest in CF like they do, I could try and aid them in that as could others by becoming Imms ourselves.

I am 100% positive none of them want to CF end or are actively doing anything to try and harm CF.

I don't have to agree with every decision Imma make to respect the fact that they invest their time and are willing to make those decisions.

nt

There's Imms that I think are awesome and are consistently, visibly awesome. There's others that are sometimes awesome, but probably really busy with other stuff. There's some that are kinda invisible to me, or I don't really understand their motivations and impact.

I think that's mostly normal though.

But I will say that the staff voice, particularly lately, is very muted. I don't hear a lot of comments on things here or in general, other than maybe one or two sentences...it's pretty quiet overall. So I kinda just cross my fingers and hope for the best?

I have had several posts on several topics that I've ended up discarding because it simply isn't/wasn't worth the effort. The most recent was a post to dispute Scrimbul's claim that I am singularly responsible for Empire's decline.

I mean, sure, I don't agree with that assertion. And I had all kinds of points/reasons why I don't agree with it. But when it comes down to it, do I really think I'm going to change his opinion? No.

More importantly, the likelihood that ANY post of mine will be dissected, taken out of context, and/or otherwise shat upon on other forums makes me not really want to post anything.

I try to be constructive only, rather than flaming on the forums. By doing so, I *generally* don't get trolled/flamed very much, though I did see a quote from a former Imm claiming that by sticking to being constructive, I was playing "the spin game" or something.

Watch as this post, too, is deconstructed and misconstrued on another forum. :P

Yeah I don't even mean responding to criticism. That's quite often an unproductive waste of time. If I didn't get to basically tell Pro he has a learning disability in that other thread I wouldn't have even bothered. I guess I'm ####ty like that.

But I mean more generally, I know we have a ton of imms but I don't really see a lot of vocal imms. In PBFs, in game, on the forums on non-whiny topics, etc. It's just quiet.

...on a lot of what you mention.

Granted for me it's also just generally being dormant for a long time. But even without that - anything outside the game has a chance (PBFs included) of turning into a #### storm, and there comes a point where you just decide you'd rather not post and get sucked into it.

My characters get ample attention, so I might be biased...

Granted, I think I get ample attention because I play characters that con-die after 400 or 500 hours, and I'm willing to spend twenty minutes in a shrine every night waiting for the IMMteraction and I'm willing to deal with adversity and hardship IC without getting bent out of shape, so I might be biased...

But I think they're, by and large, doing a tremendous job.

As far as I know I have had little contact with Daev and Baer, but that's as much a matter of choices I've made as anything, but I do feel that they garner a hell of a lot more animosity than they deserve. Seriously.

I do wish all the IMMs would consider just how heavily unnecessarily snarky/nasty comments affect the playerbase when they pop up in PBFs, because it's a text-based adventure-game and there's no need for anyone to be a #### on either side of the fence.

Now, I know if it were me, reading everything that gets written, I wouldn't be giving it my all either. In the face of that much bitching and whining I don't see how any of them could want to go above and beyond for such an ungrateful mass of people. But an eye for an eye and all that just leaves everyone feeling sour.

I only give 70% because I think it should be easier for some quality Hero IMMs to get jumped up. Nythos is super quality and he's been cooling his heels for long enough, IMO.

Not having Zulgh is devastating, but maybe, hopefully, one of those guys who's always visible and presumably just looking for rules violations and checking descriptions could help to fill his shoes.

But Sam's right. All the IMMs clearly love CF and that's still the mot important thing.

This post is great. I'm just hoping the staff won't prove me right and ignore it, like they ignore every other cogent and intelligent message of "you're doing this wrong".

Without fail, game developers which cannot maintain or create a positive, open and working relationship with their players code themselves into a black hole. Group Think takes over and all voices from the out-group are disregarded as lacking nuance, objectivity, or reasons.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you don't want players to think you use your Imm-powers to #### with them, they have to understand that you too are a human being at a keyboard and vice versa.

Not just a "voice" from the collective, but individual answers to all of this.

Often times, what some players see as what would be a positive, open and working relationship falls into the man behind the green curtain thing I posted above. It is impossible to have a fully immersed experience if you know everything that is going on behind the scenes. The players can't and shouldn't know everything. That being said, there are so few conspiracy theorists, rightfully so, that there will never be a perfect answer for them. As said before and will be said again, if you want to know everything, then please feel free to apply to become part of the staff and work your way up to the level that those things become available to you.

Just enough that we're not 100% divided and clueless about each other.

There are crazies out there and some of us have kids. I have been part of this game for 19 years this month and there are some current and past immortals that have been around for just as long as me and I don't know their first names.

I'm not trying to get everyone on a first name, go to see everyone elses kids graduate, basis. All that is required is some participation and activity here now and then. For example, this thread has done more to humanize you guys than anything else we could realisticly do.

I really do like that you have activity on the CF facebook page, asking questions and putting up notifications about XP bonuses coming up and the like. The only thing I would add, would be to mirror those questions here on these forums. Activity is never a bad thing, even if its duplicated between two sites.

Believe me when I say that I understand your desire for privacy... After all, I've gone to rather great lengths to protect mine as well.

When it comes down to it, the superior way this game is run is the ONLY reason I stay.

To Imms:
"You know you've reached a fair compromise when everyone is unhappy about something"

I have -50% in anyone who claims they could do better.
And by -50% I literally mean I, we, and the game would be better not doing what the complainer is selling at least half the time.

Moreover, I'd say I have 0% faith in the ability of any of these complainers to actually run the game well. I have played and staffed many MUDS, MMOs, LARPs,and table top RP games. Something I love about this game is that for once I'm not in charge of writing and running it in order to have a good game, which means I actually feel the challenges of a player.


That doesn't mean I haven't strongly disagreed with the one of the staff or felt like they made a bad/snap decision regarding one of my characters from time to time. But hey, seriously, you can't even take a long road trip with your best friends without those moments. It's about moving on with good humor, or cutting your losses and getting away -- not being negative.

In short, yes.

Our system isn't perfect, but as long as the people behind CF continue to care about it (and I believe that we all do), CF will continue to have a bright future.

...honestly, I think the current immstaff is pretty rock solid. I'm disincluding myself in this assessment.

We've got some holes in coverage, that's for sure. But we're working to cover those holes, and cover them with people with healthy attitudes.

This sums up my feelings as well.

There are always balances to be struck in trusting people too much vs. trusting them too little, in giving too much responsibility vs. not enough, etc., and it takes all kinds. Historically, a lot of the imms best loved by the playerbase at large were really terrible at getting any other kind of work done (or worse, were great at volunteering and promising to do things, only to not come through), but you know? They did good things for the game in their way, too.

And just like everyone else, I have my old gone favorites who I wish would come back around and have more time or play again.

But on the whole I think we have some good people coming up now and I have faith that the staff can still do some very cool things.

About as much faith as I have in the average player, which is a lot.

I know that the players typically have hearsay and partial scraps of information regarding what is going on up in Immland, but it isn't as bleak as everyone likes to make out.

Communication needs to be improved, I think, but the entirety of the staff are genuinely committed and are working pretty hard to make the game a better place. Player opinions may diverge from the staff at times, but that is where improved communication comes in.

If I didn't have faith in the staff I wouldn't have taken on some of the onerous tasks that I have. We can get caught in a rut just like anyone else, so in some ways I think we have needed a little shaking up. Additionally, with my own out-of-game responsibilities multiplying suddenly after the server move, I think Vilhazarog returned at just the right time.

.

I am going to answer this completely honestly for you all. I was once a player much like others who was not sure I liked the entire IMM staff. I had my opinions and beliefs, but I wanted to do something good for this game that I have spent so much time playing. I wanted to make sure that the types of things that I love as a player was given to others.

Since I have joined the staff, I can tell you that every thought I had before was wrong. The IMM staff does an amazing job with everything they work on. They take time out of their days, probably out of the time they should be using to concentrate on life to make sure that this game is fun for those of us who play characters. The amount of work and effort they place into the game is absolutely amazing and I am extremely proud to be a part of that.

This is not something to try to change the minds of people, I just wanted to state my feelings on the matter.

I really can't say I ever had "faith" in IMMs. I assume that they will continue doing things behind the curtain that I may (rarely) get to participate in. Other than that... I get to play in their sandbox with very limited interaction with them. I do wish it were more interaction...

The immstaff has always and always will be a group of regular people who care and want to give back to the game. We all respect each other, we disagree with each other and even argue with each other. At the end of the day it's that respect that's key. I've got faith in them.

However? It's good to be challenged. It's good to have players ask hard questions and challenge it. It's good for us and for the game. We can all be better about how we go about that dialogue and listen to it. As noted a lot of imms have left. ...but a bunch have come back too.

I was an admin in the past and am working my way back to that now. I have not heard or seen anything that makes me believe for a moment that the staff has stepped backwards. And I liked many of the staff that have left as well. But, I do see a lot of good going on now as well. We have imms actively working on the code who are putting in the hours that Zulg did who weren't around before he left. I am seeing some good heroimm attendance as well. Becoming an imm with a religion is hard, but there are a few that are really doing well. And they are going to help out a lot in many areas of the game that bodes well for the future. I am glad that I came back to see if I could help out because I like what I am seeing.

The Imm to player ratio is massive these days. However as long as a permutation of Nep, Twist and Sacer is still around, then my faith is fine. No disrespect to other Imms, I just don't know them. I believe they understand that making too many changes to a game can be as harmful, if not more, than not making any changes.

This is my favorite. You want to know how you win CF? By enjoying your character.

It's really that simple.

Now, I understand that we are all competitive. No one rolls up a character thinking "Well, I'm going to rock a 30% PK ratio and con-die in 150 hrs". But sometimes, circumstances dictate that option is more than likely to happen (IE rolling an Empire Warrior during Fort'o'Clock).

However, if we stopped looking at this competition in number-sense (which sadly, is getting harder and harder to do), when you make a comment like "Cabdru won CF" you sound ####ing stupid. Did a character really win CF when he was basically forced to delete at around 200 hrs, he's had to hear about how he cheated with that character for years, et cetera.

I'd argue that Nep's Avatar paladin "won" CF a lot more than Cabdru. Shokai tat, Avatar status...that's bigger to a player like me than going 200-2.

So, basically what I mean is this, as a player, define winning CF as playing your character in a way that makes the game better for everyone. If you can do that, you've won.

That's what video games are about. Winning. Old habits die hard.

Are basic tenets of human nature. A healthy person has a healthy ego. There's a lot of ego bashing in this game, both in game and on the forums. Lots of trash talking, lots of trolling, lots of direct personal attacks against people.

If someone gets wiped by an enemy that they just can't deal with, it's an ego crushing thing, especially if they smack talk you in game and on the forums as is typical and we as a community egg this stuff on because it amuses us.

Look at PBF comments - there was a discussion about whether or not snarky/insulting comments should be under 'Immortal comments' and most people responded that they are personally entertained by other people's characters getting bashed and humiliated. It's not healthy. It's not surprising that people want to "win CF" because while "winning CF" is not necessarily possible, "losing CF" definitely is.

And PVP competetion is part of what makes CF enjoyable for a lot of the players.

Winning is subjective to the player however, but I'd argue nobody ever wins. CF simply can not be won, it can only be played. If you can't enjoy the act of playing CF, you probably shouldn't bother with it. If your enjoyment of CF is defined by a notion of winning, you're probably never going to be happy.

You can measure your success with what ever scale you want, but there is no end, there is no winning in CF. There is only playing.

As a player, I won CF each time when I played Zannon, Thendrell, Allysia, and Salyeris to age death. And I lost with all the others.
Not because of anything that I achieved or failed to though.

I won because I managed to enjoy every second of those old ass characters and felt I was a postive thing in Thera as a whole when they died. I could have gone 0-100 with all of them and not cared.

I "win" CF every time every time I realize (either in game or on a death thread) that somebody had a good time playing CF with me.

In a recent thread Quas mentioned that I can't say anything bad about anyone, which isn't true. It's just that even Pro, if you give him a chance IC, can and will surprise you with the depth he brings to his characters. And it's not just Pro! It's almost everyone. So, if you just RP with people, your expectations will often be exceeded.

All of this talk of "what exactly does this legacy/edge/tactic do?" in an attempt to maximize PK lethality, in my opinion, detracts greatly from everything else this game has to offer.

If racking up kills is all you're interested in, go play CoD or something. CF has many more facets than that.

I don't see the appeal.

The problem is not trying to win. The problem is blurring the line between ego and the game, and then taking things in the game as an attack on oneself. This results in way out of proportion reactions.

From an RP standpoint, this seems as insane to me as the actress playing Wicked Witch trying to stab the actress playing Dorothy in real life.

CF certainly does seem to attract a lot of killers / achievers, likely due to the complexity of its game mechanics and breadth of customization. And obviously their "numbers" are going to mean a lot to them.

That said, I wouldn't say the majority of CF's players fit that mold, and it's certainly not who we market to specifically.

EDIT: HTML fix.

Before I broke my ankle playing volleyball last Spring, I used to play volleyball and/or wallyball at least once a week for two hours.

The people I played with would vary. Sometimes it would be guys who were way taller and more athletic than I. Other times it would be people who had never played before.

When we play, we keep score, but we switch up teams after each game, so nobody is playing with the same person over and over.

I still played each and every point with the goal of making the ball hit the ground on the other side of the net.

Now, yeah, if I was playing against a couple of complete noobs, I didn't want that to happen by way of me serving an off-the-wall spin-ball that they had no hope of returning. I wanted to serve nice and easy, so they could bump-set-spike and we could dig it out and such. And rather than spiking hard off the wall, I might tip or drop shot or roll or push or whatever - something easier for them to play.

But the end goal was always the same - win the point.

Because otherwise, what's the point?

I never heard of Wallyball... thanks for giving me a new obscure sport to look up.

<redacted> Ha! Still a fun as hell game.

I think you hit on something in the notion that not all characters have different success criteria.

In many respects I'm not, in real life, but I definitely approach rolling a character in a very Daevrynesque way -- I have an idea of what success looks like for that character. And sure, sometimes it's something like "Damnit, I'm finally going to get an A-P to lightning control this time" or "I've never seen a tough X, I wonder if I can make it successful enough that people start saying they always knew X was a power combo" or "Man, a character in X cabal would have a constantly ####ty PK range right now, I wonder what I could make that could hang in there and do some damage." But sometimes it's a character concept that I'm really in love with and I want to see if I can bring it to life, or some interesting RP hook I have in mind, or wanting to try out a new religion or catch up on new areas I haven't explored or whatever.

And sometimes, a given kind of character in that moment just seems like it would be really fun and that's the beginning and end of it.

In CF, you can be the badass hero. In the real world, you may be the fat guy with chips on your shirt.

Seperating IC from OOC.

And yes, I'm often terrible at this myself, but we need to be able to treat every character as a singular entity.

IMMs should only be tracking IP's if the person is a known and repeated cheater. They should never give two ####s about a person's RP if that person is just known for rolling villagers and ####ting all over the Tablet.

Players need to stop assuming everytime that evil dude kills you it's because the player of that evil dude is a #### and he hates your forum identity. Do players do that? Sure they do. But the solution isn't to accept and imitate that style, it's to show those people that a better solution is just to PLAY THE DAMN GAME.

>to show those people that a better solution is just to PLAY
>THE DAMN GAME.

Interesting advice.

People are really adversarial out of game here and are very arrogant and elitist.

If you post something basic and self-explanatory like "bash is good", you'll get a handful of people trying to argue with you that bash is awful just to troll you, or because they need to validate themselves by pretending like something that is strong to you is weak to them.

Common sense things you post are met with snarky, elitist responses from people who for whatever reason want to make you feel insecure about your own skill or understanding of the game.

It's kinda ####ed up actually.

And I don't mean the whole only fight 1 v/1 1, never loot or anything. I mean have a level of respect for the environment and the game as a whole.

Own up to losing with dignity as readily as you enjoy winning a fight. Accept the consequences of defeat and looting and take it in stride. The best test of a player's character is how they handle defeat, not success.

Win or lose an encounter and there's bitching in game and on the forums.

It's the main reason I haven't really played for months and months.

At this point I think every single possible build has been decried as being OP. Now orcs are OP. Come on.

If it's OP, go do it. You. Go do it. Show us all how easy it is.

...and judging their characters based on it.

Much as you mention people think they got PK'd because of their forum persona, often a player assumes that they did/didn't get something from the imms for the same reason (or that the OTHER guy got special treatment for his/her forum persona).

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying it doesn't happen all the time to everyone.

Be respectful.

Understand that CF is run by volunteer human beings who have invested a lot of time and emotion into this game. We aren't always perfect, consistent, on-time, or even right, but we're also paid nothing and often times, appreciated little. Regardless of whether you agree with an individual or the collective, I promise you there isn't a single person on staff who doesn't mean well, even if we fail sometimes.

And believe it or not, we care what you think. We just prefer it when you express yourself in a clear, informed, and adult-like manner. Just be ready to hear "no", and don't forget that immortals hear that too sometimes.

Losing gracefully. This is a highly competitive game, so it often attracts competitive personalities, but when people pull the knee-jerk equivalent of "kicking over the Monopoly Board" it sucks.

I agree with this, and just...try to have good sportsmanship. Going to my earlier point about learning curve...just be aware of that and not full looting everyone and their mother because someone did something kind of mean to you.

It's a weird line since this is a game we promote and want everyone to kill each other and be in character. However I think it would be better if players were more sporting about it. Yeah maybe that guy killed you a lot and you finally got him, that doesn't mean you need to full lot and full sac his stuff. Your game is better when you have enemies, don't push'em to delete.

If you get your really cool item taken? Roll with it, don't escalate it. Are you on the weak side? That doesn't mean you make life miserable for everyone on the 'strong' side when you do get a kill.

As a flip side I think the staff could look at finding ways to reward this kind of behavior more.

Try to take everyday that way when playing this game. I watch some players be so conservative that they have literally taken the enjoyment away from themselves without realizing it. Adrenalin is good for you. Fill your body with it and get the CF high.

"I watch some players be so conservative that they have literally taken the enjoyment away from themselves without realizing it."

You guys say that (and not just you in this thread)...but there's a lot of consequence to dying. Dying is heavily punished. You've got some OCD people like me who can't abide looking at a score sheet with a 12 con even throwing away the loots and stat hit.

I wish I could just will myself to not care about con loss but its not something I've been able to do even having con died a char.

Con loss exists to *make* you conservative. You guys could tweak that on PK deaths whenever you want if you really want to get people to risk themselves more.

I've said this before on a few occassions, but I think that players need to roll with the punches more.

Without going into too much detail, there is a player right now who knows he is never, ever getting my tattoo because of his character's choices. Rather than throw a fit and delete, he is using that failure to shape his character into someone great. I cannot even begin to describe how much I respect that attitude.

So you can't beat Character X because they stomp you every time. Roll with that! Express your angst; roleplay your failure!

Not getting the PKs or goodies or imm-love doesn't kill your character. Deleting rather than playing it out (or at least making an honest effort) kills your character.

I'll be honest here that I feel like you're unrealistic.

Between the PBF/PK Stat/elitism culture, conn loss, conn's role in saving throws and regen, the scarcity of edge points (not wanting to burn them on things like resurgent for instance), the real power difference between caballed and uncaballed, empowered vs unempowered, etc - there's a plethora of reasons why it's logical for someone to delete rather than to continue.

And the only motivation to carry on is that they *might* get rewarded and they *might* get respected. Or not, to both of those. They could get made fun of the same amount at 500 hours as at 50 hours but they'd be having a lot more fun with 450 of those hours if they didn't spend it on a failed concept.

Need to respect how people want to spend their time, I personally don't want to spend my time hiding in a dark corner or doing things solo because some aspect of my choices hasn't panned out the way I'd like it to - and I really don't expect anyone else to either.

We do this a lot too, we want others to hang in there and walk the tough line but then we say that we like to make things tough or etc. There are knobs in there that can be turned, but the inevitable conclusion of those policies are people giving up and the only thing that differs is the quantity of people doing it. I'm not saying things should never be tough - just that we need to understand the necessary outcome of things being tough is people giving up on them - because this is a hobby so people aren't going to commit to it at a level that kills the fun for them.

>I'll be honest here that I feel like you're unrealistic.

>Between the PBF/PK Stat/elitism culture, conn loss, conn's
>role in saving throws and regen, the scarcity of edge points
>(not wanting to burn them on things like resurgent for
>instance), the real power difference between caballed and
>uncaballed, empowered vs unempowered, etc - there's a plethora
>of reasons why it's logical for someone to delete rather than
>to continue.

>And the only motivation to carry on is that they *might* get
>rewarded and they *might* get respected. Or not, to both of
>those. They could get made fun of the same amount at 500
>hours as at 50 hours but they'd be having a lot more fun with
>450 of those hours if they didn't spend it on a failed
>concept.

Based on the premises you've provided, yes, it is logical for someone to delete rather than continue. Those premises focus on the need for being rewarded. I disagree that reward is the only motivation for playing CF.

>Need to respect how people want to spend their time, I
>personally don't want to spend my time hiding in a dark corner
>or doing things solo because some aspect of my choices hasn't
>panned out the way I'd like it to - and I really don't expect
>anyone else to either.

Hey, me neither.

>We do this a lot too, we want others to hang in there and walk
>the tough line but then we say that we like to make things
>tough or etc. There are knobs in there that can be turned,
>but the inevitable conclusion of those policies are people
>giving up and the only thing that differs is the quantity of
>people doing it. I'm not saying things should never be tough
>- just that we need to understand the necessary outcome
>of things being tough is people giving up on them - because
>this is a hobby so people aren't going to commit to it at a
>level that kills the fun for them.

If it's fun for you to switch characters when the one you're playing isn't living up to your expectations, then you are perfectly free to do that. What _I_ am saying is that I am far, far more inclined to reward players who stick it out and play because they like the role rather than delete because they feel they have a failed character.

Yeah, I just mean to say there's a common theme that "we'd like players to take more risks". Well, there's knobs that control how painful those risks are...we can turn them and people will take more risks.

More and more I notice when reading roles that everyone is doing roles ala "Unique hero/villain".

However, in my experience, my best role-played characters were always simple roles. Spoiled children of rich people = Imperial Priest. Normal dwarven soldier who left his clan to find his way in the world = Commander of Battle.

Every role you write doesn't need to be a Neptune Award-winning short story. Sometimes the most enjoyable and easiest roles to play are relatively simple and straight-forward.

Because rolecontest rewards are very good. And because simple doesn't get awarded.

I can half-ass a unique role and get awarded way more than I can if I perfectly play a typical role.

>And because
>simple doesn't get awarded.

It does depend a lot on who's judging. That's some of the good and bad of rotating judgingship. I have definitely picked simple or archetypal but well-executed roles.

That being said, I think roles have actually gotten *less* outlandish on average since the advent of role contests and PBFs because I think people are now more aware of other people's concepts. When role contests started and the prizes were just a train and a title, I could literally get a half dozen entries in a single contest that were all necromancers who were possessed by demons or who in some way were secretly demons or devils. Now that everyone has more visibility into what everyone else is doing, most people have the sense that that role is in fact not shockingly original but one of the most clichéd tropes around.

nt

You just don't see every PBF.
Characters should be unique in some way, but that should be in terms of their RP, not their role.
Perhaps a unique role helps players define more unique RP for their characters. I like story based roles just for the writing of them.

But hell, my last two actual char had the simplest roles ever.
They weren't special people.
They were just people.

I don't read a lot of published roles.

But I have listened to a load of stories as a perennial Village elder and via my recent stead as Harbinger.

Most roles that I've heard in game are pretty simple.

Largely because if you were a "normal" person you would be working as a farmer or merchant, not leading the most elite fighters as Commander of Battle. Great roles can develop from simple ones, but there needs to be a reason you are not in a simple life.

If you look at historic heroic fiction...very rarely are the heroes people that were "groomed" for great things.

Often times they are farmers/normal people that were forced to act heroic by their circumstances.

What I was really getting at is the tendency to write roles that have extra-ordinary circumstances (my parent was a demon and that's why I am an AP etc) when in fact I would argue that the best roles start off very normal and become extra-ordinary as circumstances dictate.

Obviously you don't see them, but they are there.

What you're seeing of roles is generally PBF entries (or your own, or roles that other people publish). A lot of those are people who wrote a "Unique character" role. Or, at least, those are the ones that you remember.

I bet if you search them though, a lot of them are simple archetype roles.

Many of my own roles are "normal" but with a hook of some kind.

I.e. Evil human shaman who wants power and the Emperor's throne.
Hook: He's racist against non-humans.

Name suddenly escapes me.

Most of us are normal / ordinary people. When we play a fantasy game, we don't want to be "normal", we want to be the epic villain or righteous hero. That, and I think a lot of people do assume that simple roles (but not necessarily simple characters) mean less XP or lower chances of a RC win. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's one reason we take turns judging role contests: different strokes for different folks.

I try non standard (but not unavailable game rule wise) role ideas because I want the most role xp for my initial role entry I can get with the least time investment. If I have an original or unusual idea I feel I'm more likely to get 1k+. If the idea is unique or new it has the added benefit of extra content for subsequent entries other than standard CF fare. Best case my idea stands out and I get an immteraction out of it, or in the case of an empowerment class I've got something different than the last follower of the god I played to talk about in my interviews.

...Because of that? As in, even if you do an elaborate role and only get 500 IMM xp do you delete?

It's ####ing stupid of me, but I'd rather not enter a role and get 0 imm experience than enter a role and get 500. That and "failed" quests are a weakness, though I've mostly overcome that one.

It really doesn't make sense considering how little I pay attention to stats otherwise. I don't even care about the edges or the immortal's opinion of the role. It's just a dumb, idiotic metric (of my own making) that can make or break a character for me.

I see a pretty good mix honestly. For every out there role there's a more simple role. For every half-dragon, half-man, half-kobold...there's a farmer just looking to make his way out there, or the old street urchin kid trying to do good, or the angry power hungry fire giant.

Me? I've always been partial to a well played dumb person role. A big dumb giant who nails that simple minded stupidity? Priceless. ..surly dwarf is a close second.

I might even say that is a normal role. Cookie cutter could be boring.

Unique roles are fun. For me, they were more fun when I was a newer player, though. Now I'm more interested in the growth of an archetypical role or an archetype with one interesting twist.

I agree with Daevryn that even in my fairly short time as an Imm the angel-born conjurers are becoming less.

I personally have a very specific type of role I tend to favor, apparently, as I once had two characters from the same player win my role contest. Oops. He deleted one to decline the prize as far as I remember, so put yo' pitchforks down :)


As far as random immteractions go, cookie-cutters are really appealing. It requires a lot less thought and role-reading to guess how standard "mages burned my village" rager is going to react to a situation than "I'm secretly being mentally dominated by a mage and I'm a Rager mole that is in love with a demon!" role will, which means more people can be involved and it can happen more often. The cookie-cutter character can then use the immteraction for personal growth, and I always beam with pride when I see something I do impact a character in a meaningful, positive way.

My favorite thing about CF is when you totally immerse yourself in a character and literally start thinking the way they would. Just losing myself in a character's RP makes me CF experience so much more worthwhile, that I don't need sick gear or IMM involvement or rewards. I just need to keep that veneer of "This is a fantasy world, and I am a person within that world."

That's also why my biggest pet peeve is OOC #### in the game. Either by players who don't want to make the effort, or from IMMs who are confused by a situation, et cetera.

My favorite thing, personally, is the bond and relationship you build with other people while roleplaying in game. It's very, very hard for me to get "into" an uncaballed character. I like killing, I like exploring, but those things aren't as good as having a real team of characters you can interact with in game and have fun with.

Usually for me this is Immortal-interaction, Immortals have the tools to run something like a "D&D style interaction". That's epic to me and that is what, to me, separates CF from a game like SWTOR. SWTOR has exploring, it has PVE, it has PVP and is very balanced, but it doesn't have someone who will cater an event to you and roleplay with you and all the roleplay in that game is cheesy and stupid.

nt

Followed closely by theory crafting funny builds.
And Bards.
Wood elf bards.
I F***ing love wood elf bards.
They're my version of crack.

n/t

As I mentioned before, player events like demons storming the Fortress or random Immortals interacting through mobs.... the unknown and unplanned moments make this game.

My favorite times on CF were always interacting with a mob or Immortal that I didn't follow or didn't interact with re: cabals and such.

What made me love CF was Muuloc just taking an interest in Kruuank and making me feel better about being a noob uncaballed evil hero.

Or Thror taking Ghrim in a direction I never would have expected. Or whomever that IMM was the time I was playing a gnome invoker and some random mob just chatted with me for a half hour when I was spamming spells.

Whether that's immersing myself in a mortal char or in a conversation with a mortal as Twist.

Also, I enjoy the brainstorming part of stuff like the shaman revamp, and looking back at players enjoying stuff that I suggested.

I've begun to treat CF more like a project than a game, and I enjoy working on CF in various ways, like one might enjoy working on a car project in their garage. It's fun.

The level of depth and complexity. There are so many things to explore, from mechanics, to areas, to religions and player roles. The game is a constantly shifting puzzle that never fails to surprise when you least expect it.

I'll list two things:

1) Its variability and longevity; it is a game I have been playing for nearly 19 years and that, while my interest can come and go at times, can still draw me in and surprise me.

2) I have talked about this before and probably could write a monolithic post about it again, but the very notion of an RPG where all the other major characters are people trying to do their own thing (possibly to your benefit or not) is really compelling to me. When you're plotting against or trying to kill the Emperor, he isn't one of 30 different NPCs the frazzled DM is desperately trying to keep straight and make distinguishable from each other with a funny voice -- he's someone just like you with singular focus on a single character, and he's trying to live and not be deposed.

When you're plotting against or trying to kill the Emperor, he isn't one of 30 different NPCs the frazzled DM is desperately trying to keep straight and make distinguishable from each other with a funny voice -- he's someone just like you with singular focus on a single character, and he's trying to live and not be deposed.

This one is really tough.

I think ultimately CF is a game where as I play I really get immersed in a character's overall story. Every CF nemesis I've had was way, way more interesting and cool than any villian in any other game, movie, book, whatever. I started playing this game 16-17 years ago and I can clearly remember nemesis characters from that far back. I remember Agorinth kicking my ass on a daily basis. I remember getting pasted all over the Eastern road by Palan. I remember Zorszaul PWK'ing me right outside the Inn. I remember epic battles with Karel where one of us always barely got away. I remember Phaistus making any Scion on nearly unkillable. I remember Dwoggurd flurrying me into next Tuesday. I remember Yanacek being a couple good poisons away from ruining my day. I remember Ilivarra always able to kill my friends and allies and just slip away from me.

I remember all that stuff, and all my great allies and friends and RP I've had. CF turns the gameplay and merges it with the RP to create a more living story than any game could ever hope to accomplish. Pure RP is a lot of fun, but CF merges that with gameplay to back it up. In RP without rules...everyone just acts all powerful. If you want to be all powerful here? You need to back it up. ...and sometimes the most fun characters to play with *aren't* all powerful. This is the game where an evil thief swindled a necromancer on their lich quest by going to the God of Thieves to make a forgery of one of her lichquest items...and got the necromancer to pay for her own forgery. That story? That's CF right there.

This is the game where an evil thief swindled a necromancer on their lich quest by going to the God of Thieves to make a forgery of one of her lichquest items...and got the necromancer to pay for her own forgery. That story? That's CF right there.

>This is the game where an evil thief swindled a necromancer
>on their lich quest by going to the God of Thieves to make a
>forgery of one of her lichquest items...and got the
>necromancer to pay for her own forgery. That story? That's CF
>right there.

I find it really interesting and instructive that this is constantly brought up as a high point on CF. I believe that in many cases, something similar to this happening today would cause years of forum drama for an Imm actively taking a part in ruining a character that someone had put so much time into.

By itself the story sounds bad-ass, but it takes a very special person to be energized rather than discouraged by being the necromancer in this situation. Getting involved in it as an Imm is something that with the current climate I would be incredibly hesitant to do, both for the necromancer's sake as well as the burden of drama that would come when the forum community makes its judgment.

I agree that I don't know why this specific example would be picked as a high point in this game.

I don't consider it one, for all the reasons you mention.

In Eve Online, you'd hear tale of things like titan heists and ganking down someone's epic ship and so on and so forth. But even that game, there's so little someone can really do to you that is permanent in nature and most big things like titan heists fall upon the whole alliance and not squarely on one person's back.

And most people outside of CF and Eve Online consider Eve Online to be too harsh to play. CF makes Eve Online look like 'Hello Kitty Island'.

I enjoy when the players get a kick out of something I do when they don't expect it at all.

As an Imm, I'm always really excited to see the creativity that players have when interacting with something I or someone I know has created, whether it's my religion, an area, or something else.

For myself, I come up with things and try to think about what the reactions will be. When people take my original idea and make it work in a completely different way I'm really impressed. It's really awesome to play this game with so many intelligent and creative people that can both understand the work you've done as well as take it past the limits of your imagination and make it better, whether that be a viable race/class combo, a role idea, or just solving a puzzle in a new way.

Searching for a victim, spotting them on a 'where' in a group of three levelling, adrenaline kicks in. Engage. A) Win. Massive rush. B) Lose. Throw the keyboard. Analyse what went wrong.

I just don't get that rush from any other game.

Biggest rush I ever had in CF was solo tracking a group of three battle into Organia as a solo necro. Finding them in the veil maze. Killing two and one escaped. I WISH I could have seen their fellowship chat during that.

PS Also any time I go into the Circles of Hell it's a rush.

NT

For me personally, I think it's the poor relationship between the staff and the players. Now, there has never been a completely transparent relationship between the staff and the players, and I'm not sure if there ever should be.

However, when we have a vocal minority of the playerbase that accuses the head IMP of cheating and accuses his wife of everything from over-rewarding to global warming. Even players who are not lumped in with those players have to be negatively affected by this discourse.

So how to solve this issue? Why not have more posts on Officials where IMMs actively seek player input (and I'm not talking about for flaws or for helpfiles). I'm talking about "How can we make cabal wars better", or "How can we make empowerment power".

Second, I think if players are expected to own their bad behavior and move on, I think it would go a long way if the staff did the same. None of us are perfect and no one expects the staff to be, however, there have been multiple big sweeping changes to the MUD recently and I think if nothing else, talking about these changes will allay some of the fears and issues with CF.

I don't think cheating accusations are actually as poisonous as they might appear. It is what it is. People need to just get over that.

There are different motivations for why people play (Bartle test based):

1) Some people play to compete, like chess. These people will be angry about imbalance, they'll be angry about unfair rewards or lack thereof, they'll be angry about inconsistency and cheating. Killer personality types.

2) Some people play to roleplay, like D&D. These people tend to be easiest going, though they probably get angry about lack of interaction, lack of follow up and unclear instructions and guidelines and lack of participation in RP. Social personality types.

3) Some people play to explore and solve puzzles. These people are going to get mad about broken quests, areas they're not allowed to access, changes to "nerf" things because of cheating. Explorer personality types.

4) Some people play for recognition. They want good stats, leadership positions, titles, tattoos, recognition from the Imms and player base. These people will be angry about most of the things that the other people will be angry about combined. Achievement personality type.

CF caters to all these people, but equally it's not *ideal* for each one of these people. CF has a mixed direction, which is both good and bad. Some things are finely balanced, others very roughly balanced. Some things are very rule based and consistent, other things very arbitrary. So on and so forth.

The imms don't all share the same motivations and neither do the players and in a small environment like this, there's no isolation to keep people separated into their own sandboxes. "All roleplayers go to herald, all PVP'ers go elsewhere" is a weak form of separation. It was this way in 2001, 2005 and now 2013 and it will be likely forever.

So realistically, what is there to do about this? I'm not sure anything, I'm not sure that people can all agree about how to make things ideal for all of these people or that people are motivated to do so. In this community it's impossible to get more than 3 people to agree on *anything*.

nt

Regardless of whether the cheating happened, it honestly just needs to be dropped. Every supposed example is so long ago. If it did happen, it seems to have stopped.

I firmly believe that people are not getting "over-rewarded" and that rewards are just something that we all want and get jealous of others getting or mad at having to face the rewards. As the staff comes and goes, different sections of the player base lose a focused person to watch and reward them. This is remedied by new staff as was just witnessed with the new Imperial Immortal. It does require some patience, but it isn't being ignored.

Personally, I see one of the biggest issues all around is how jaded everyone has become. If every player approached CF by not trying to find out who is behind each character (and judge them for it) or how to be the most overpowered build possible (and I am guilty of that at times) and instead just focused on having fun CF would be so different.

1) Vilhazarog has made a very impressive dent in the bugs lately, which I commend the man for (thanks!) but the game is lacking coders... even before Zulghinlour stepped away, the game is lacking in momentum dealing with code. The new shaman paths are amazing but how many years did it take? We all love the Inferno but how long has the revamp been going on? Things like balance tweaking always take a backburner and can cause lots of rage/hatred for both players and the staff when things become abused for longer periods of time... the recent change to emetic poison was nice but there are countless examples over time where it had been six months before something got balanced. There just seems to be a mantra to release something and not touch it (hunters, arcane thieves, initial trappers, etc). When we ask for specifics on a skill, we're also at the whims of two people who may or may not feel like doing it.

I think the programming aspects of the game need to be handled in a more professional fashion and frankly just needs more power behind it. Something like a roadmap would be great, knowing what's coming... tease us with room descriptions, new abilities and say "Coming this fall!" Ask the players what we want in order of priority and make it less of an unknown whats going on behind the scenes and when it'll get done. Transparency seems like an ongoing message from the players that the immortals just don't listen to.

And get more coders! There's plenty of us out there who code (hey I applied once but they laughed at me).

2) There's definitely a lot of problems in the Immortal Land... not sure if it's been wrapped up or is lingering around but there has been some caustic attitudes and personalities that have driven a lot of people away from being Immortals. I don't think we need to list the graveyard of all the Imms who have left, or why, but I think it should be something the Immortals look at as a whole and figure out. When you've got lower level Imms not agreeing with higher level Imms, its not a healthy environment.... and driving away amazing players who made the step to being an Immortal like Mekantos (we miss you Sean!) is what has constantly worsened the playerbase over time. This game is filled with mostly veterans at this point, which are your pool of people to become Immortals, and losing them will be the nail in the coffin. Thankfully we have a new evil Immortal but needed this long ago.

3) With a smaller player base, the balance of the sides has been pretty terrible lately. It's all Fortress or all Empire, with scrappy lose ends on both sides.... and if you're on one of the sides "in power", you eventually run out of things to do currently. So what to change to this?

-More player events. The moments when demons stormed the Fortress or when we have holiday events... those make the playerbase all login and do something. I remember a *lot* more of these happening back in the day and sadly I can't remember one happening in the last year! When you have people just logging out because they have nothing to do, we're failing and the only way to increase it back to that "critical mass" is to do things to jumpstart the momentum. You all laugh at Orctober fest, but it has done a lot for just giving people something to do which increases numbers. Think of the Rites and how every villager shows up during that time - you need more of these for the whole playerbase.

-I'd say remove the immexp requirement on Silent Tower. If we've only really got one serious area explore area until the Inferno reopens, you need something that people can get taken to so they can do things. If you ever want to see Archmages get taken down, you need a lot of people or you abuse bugs (bad) or are insanely crazy powerful (Ravon, Cabdru, etc).... having a bunch of heralds or random people wander in there isn't the end of the world. I never understood why it was a pain to get into the Inferno (coins and nuts) and now we just have an even harder one for the Silent Tower. There's plenty of things to do in there alone, but how does that help the playerbase at all when everyone becomes a lone wolf doing their own thing?

-I've always been annoyed at the "balance" sways that happen mainly from people having more than one character. If you're a leader, you should only have one character. I've always been inclined to make it one character per player since it would make people invest in their characters more... but not sure it'll ever happen.

-Give bonuses for raiding when no one is around or raiding when you're against the odds. If you're one guy, fighting to retrieve against seven, it should be an epic battle (like give them damage reduction based on the number of opponents or something equivalent). People should want to raid, not grumble about going to die and getting full looted for "no reason".



I've got more but I'll leave it with those three points for now.

The two go hand in hand.

We could have a new race or class each month, new/revamped areas every other month, all kinds of quests, the best capture-the-flag system out there, but none of it matters if nobody is playing.

Because let's face it, some of the solutions to bring players back would also likely drive some players away as well.

What you need to wonder is whether or not the numbers after the pwipe and death of the old server were something you might want to figure out how to capture.

In that, I mean as solid as small tweaks and changes aid the game, are big sweeping changes needed?

Every time we've had player events and new things, numbers go up. As I mentioned in my other post, things like the Rites, Holiday events, Orctober Fest and more always seem to raise the spirits and numbers of the players. Some of the best moments in the game came from events, including a lot of big memories I have from over the years come from them.

When was the last time a big event happened in CF? How many years did it take for a class revamp? How often do plagues cover Galadon, demons storm the Fortress, God fight in the sky or more? I cannot remember the last "epic" thing to happen in CF....

The lure of the game is *not* just killing and roleplaying with other people, it's the unknown and the unplanned things that make it mystical. Remember Amaranthe's story and how right afterwards the game had 50+ people on for a solid few days if not weeks?

And then when the story dies because nothing came of it, how low are we now?

I'm telling you guys, you want to bring life back into the game, then rock the world a bit with something to spice it up.

.

Plagues, demons, god fights. Yep, those are all the things I liked doing when I was able to be around. They are going to happen again and with regularity. I am working on a plan for the current admins to get the okay to let these things happen again and the moment they say go for it, watch out for the flying bulphoeneti.

.. we will come.

It = Masters

I, for example, have been considering a Tribunal role. There's a certain bar to clear in terms of doing certain grinds, and when I picture myself sitting in a city with 20 players on and nothing happening it doesn't make me want to invest my limited time, and thus I contribute to the problem of lower playerbase by not playing. A lot of the character types I like (support) best don't make any sense without allies. And because there's few people on, group fights don't happen as much.

I don't think things need to be this bleak. I believe there are enough people out there who would like to play CF that we could get to 200-300 online players, the problem is reaching them. Realistically we won't find them, but the gaming market is much bigger than it was when CF started, so even though other games take a large percentage of the overall pie, there gotta be a lot of people who would play if they knew about it. But CF has little to no resources.

But CF has little to no resources.

If there were a solid plan, we have some resources that we could apply to marketing.

Pay players a dime every time they produce a PDF of them somehow promoting or talking about Carrion Fields, in a positive light, on a unique forum. Preferably the forums where the maximum number of hipster nerds hangs about.

... maybe have a competition to design a cool "ad" for CarrionFields, where the first and second place prizes was a bunch of PBF certificates.

It's not a troll. I'm serious. Ads won't do anything. No one is looking to play a text based game. We must spread The Word where it might be Heard.

You are right that ads will not do anything. People are trained to ignore ads. I keep getting spammed with some pr0n fantasy game banner ad every time I look at Dio's but I just don't care about either pr0n or other fantasy games. The way to hook people for a game like this isn't to sell it as a downgrade from an MMO but as an upgrade from D&D.

Advertise the piss out of that. Why do people still read books? There are movies!?!?!?! We face that exact same problem. Why play a text based game when there are games with graphics. Why? Because there is SOOO much more flexibility in text (and the imagination) than in pictures. Sure, lots of people don't read these days, but lots and lots and lots still do.

Find a reason Why people would play a MUD today, and then spend money advertising that.

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

Personally, I don't think you're going to pull in 10,000 new players with a banner ad somewhere.

Effective marketing to me for a game like this would be getting a booth at a convention or attending events like Winter Fantasy and etc with a CF t-shirt and going at it hard with word of mouth and fliers.

Capturing 5 people at a time and hopefully having fun while doing it.

Between the cost, time investment, and level of coordination require to pull off something like an official CF presence at a convention, I don't think it'll ever happen.

But! We do have flyers and could probably help drum up some other resources for people who want to promote CF at whatever conventions or meetups they attend.

It's no secret that there are plenty of groups and conventions out there full of people CF would typically appeal to, and I would imagine we have players who are already involved in those kinds of things but simply haven't considered (or aren't comfortable) connecting those people with CF.

"Between the cost, time investment, and level of coordination require to pull off something like an official CF presence at a convention, I don't think it'll ever happen."

That's fair. It's certainly non-trivial time and expense and requires people to take something of a leap of faith. For instance if you're flying out to a convention for 3 days and you're paying full cost (you don't have frequent flyer miles or whatever) for everything, you might be putting $1200 into an event as someone who lives within the US and the loss of some vacation time that might otherwise be spent with family.

Not everyone is able to do that.

Note that, without imm involvement in game - whether that's by running some newbie events or whatever - it will not be successful. If you want to convert people on the basis of the events listed above (cool global quests, gechoes, unique CF situations that don't happen in other games) - you need those events to be present at a predictable time so that the players can drive in traffic around those times.

Maybe a half step in between the two is to try to coordinate efforts around which we can drive traffic to the game and then, as a group, plan on driving that traffic at that time via reaching out to other forums or real life friends.

There are flash MUD clients you should be able to use (or inquire about their use) to make this happen. Also inquire the price of giving CF a Kong badge for completing Simon's quest. That would draw people in. A medium badge would be probably right for the amount of work required. Sure, many of them wouldn't be likely to continue, but it would be a good influx of players, some of which could remain and play CF.

It has been discussed in the past and it would be nice if Imms actually did it this time.

I don't remember exactly what the issue was, but I had trouble getting our Flash client working (connecting) on their site when I tired.

I'll see about giving it another try here soon.

E.g. Have everyone start at level 51 with skills at 100%.

FWIW, I would probably stop playing CF if we did this.

Hero is the most boring level to me by a wide margin. (Though I can see the arguments for doing it.)

Interest in MUDs as a genre continue to decline, and that of course means with CF as well. We can debate why player X or player Y left CF specifically, but the fact remains that MUDs aren't as popular as they used to be. This is evident not only in the player bases of other MUDs but in the activity on MUD-related websites as well.

Further, CF has a relatively high bar of entry in that the learning curve is pretty steep, the strict IC rules make it harder to teach/learn, and the community is awful.

Some of this cannot be helped and some of it can.

CF has many problems associated with it. It also has a lot of good aspects.

Please note, my opinions are not necessarily representative of the Imm Staff policy. I am a relatively recent player who has just embarked upon contributing my time and effort to this game. Many of the other Imms have a wealth of knowledge, hours of contribution to the game and a level of experience which I probably will never reach. As such my comments should be considered based on my current level of expertise as a player and recent heroimm:

There is a definitely a poorer relationship between the players and the staff than there needs to be and yes, you are absolutely right that it is harmful to the game. It is my firm hope that at some point in the future we can all draw a line in the sand, forget past grudges, and start moving forward as a community. I don't think anyone needs to own up to anything, but they do need to recognize that when they act in a way which is self-serving, it is often at expense of the rest of the community.

Increased discussion and a genuinely honest, level-headed debate will go a long way toward reducing the imm/player rift. I'd definitely like to see more player engagement and more communication in general. I would like to move away from personal attacks totally, it adds nothing to the debate and generally diminishes credibility.

Transparency is a tricky issue and it is one I have discussed quite recently. Different people have different ideas on the level of transparency that needs to be maintained for different reasons. I am personally all for a high degree of transparency, but as I have previously stated, I lack the experience that many other staff members have. In addition there are certain benefits that come with non-transparent Imm tools like snooping players, anonymously run quest lines and so on.

The level of Imm dedication to this game is insane, thousands and thousands of man hours are channeled into making this game a better place on a yearly basis. That isn't an exaggeration and I am in awe of the hard work people put in, having peered behind the curtain. Likewise the level of player dedication is quite spectacular, many other games would have disappeared by now and a large part of that is due to the exceptionally loyal players. I would think that the CF players are one of CF's strongest assets, provided everyone can work together as a community.

As players and imms alike presumably enjoy the game, I would imagine that there is common ground for discussion and agreement. CF has almost been around for 2 decades and nobody wants to see CF disappear.

There's a few things in my eyes. I think a lot of folks below have made some great points too.

The smaller playerbase is the source of a lot of things. The game was designed for a lot more. We've made some tweaks to help balance that such as bonus xp based on people on, and skill learning bonuses when it's flush with people. It does take what were small problems in the older days and magnify them a great deal. Torak mentioned the balance swings, and I think that absolutely is made much worse by a smaller player base. Cabal A gets big. Playerbase says "Damnit those people are really rolling. Screw'em. Lets take'em down." These shifts happened all the time back in the day, but when numbers were higher the time the pendulum was 'in the middle' was a lot longer. Now it shoots from one extreme to the other.

Another big one is how to attract players to a game like this. How do we get new blood here? We have several big problems facing this.

1. Learning curve. It's brought up several times in this thread but this is a tough game to learn. However part of the game's appeal is the fact it's tough. So the tricky part is how do you make it *accessible* without destroying the difficulty that made it fun to begin with. One of the awesome things about CF is I can think years back to my first character, and then look at some of my more successful ones and think "Holy ####. I went from barely being able to get over level 20 to having a Marshall of the Fort." We need that progress, but we need to find ways to introduce players to our more arcane mechanics better. (Or in some cases see if certain mechanics still even make sense)

2. Marketing. We have a good facebook and twitter presence now and we keep pushing the vote for MUD sites, but I think at this point what we need is to get our voice out there to non-MUD sites. There's been a pretty big push in gaming with retro styled games. Lots of old school indie games have stylized 8 and 16-bit art. I have dreams of someone who's a better writer than myself getting some guest article posted on a mainstream gaming site pimping CF. Retro is cool now. MUDs are retro. So while I think it's a problem? I think it's a problem with a giant bubble about to burst in our advantage. People are sick of cookie cutter MMO's with no risk or reward that require months of playtime to get progress. This isn't CF. CF is fast paced. There's risk. It's hard. It has all the things a lot of people want, but it's just not out in front of their faces. ....but once they come, that learning curve issue rears its ugly head. It doesn't do us any good if people play for 4 days and leave. We need to find ways to get that magical CF sauce early.

People are sick of cookie cutter MMO's with no risk or reward that require months of playtime to get progress. This isn't CF. CF is fast paced. There's risk. It's hard. It has all the things a lot of people want, but it's just not out in front of their faces. ....


but once they come, that learning curve issue rears its ugly head. It doesn't do us any good if people play for 4 days and leave. We need to find ways to get that magical CF sauce early.

If you want to fix the learning curve, do so. An official item database (though lowering lore and observation upping lore mitigates that somewhat and keeps it in game, which is good). Make an official map diku-wiki style (or just use that one). Hell, make that map in game available via help files (instead of stupid map items that no one carries).

Find the thing that newbie get stuck trying to figure out and fix it. Update helpfiles to be more specific and exact so that someone who has never played a MUD before *knows* what bash does before they even have the skill.

You could even recruit players to help write helpfiles with more specific info and then edit them to make sure they are correct. Spread the work around. If you get people to buy in to the Why of doing it (lower the learning curve so that new players come in (MORE FRAGS)) then people will donate time and effort and money to making it happen.

I think the plan is for the wiki to have some of this. Then again that's slightly part of the problem. Anything that requires a player to go somewhere else for that info is tricky.

I think offhand some good ideas are maybe a bit more detailed helpfiles on how to get to certain low level areas and gearing strategies for certain classes. Some of those things aren't intuitive to new players. IE: I'm a newbie mage. Man I'm gonna wanna get as much int as I can right, since that will make my spells more powerful! ....actually no.

Maybe even have some basic preps in the helpfile too. Basically get new players on a bit more level playing field with people who've been playing for years and years.

CF has the best extant product, I believe, for what it's trying to be.

However, as OP indicated, the players who cheat, troll, flame, slander imms, et al, really make it so that I can't really recommend any of my friends who express interest to join the community.

"Players are expected to own bad behavior"
I haven't seen anyone actually do this in practice.

This has to change. I run into plenty of newb characters -- but who really wants to play an RP game with people like that? I believe we aren't retaining the players who are trying this MUD, looking for a free, fun fantasy game that's high quality because it's not an MMO catering to paying masses. We aren't creating the sort of community where I'd be happy inviting anyone.

So how are we going to get more players to play more?

nt

The wiki and help files are very slowly improving, but the first thing that someone trying to figure out game mechanics is told is go to qhcf.
Once there, they are exposed to a community that will not incentive them to stay.

Doing a search on officials will reveal a fair number of caustic arguments as well. You're not getting the D&D crowd into the game like that.