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.

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.