Fra Antonius's page

Fra Antonius wrote:

Why not try to make auction houses like what they are in real life? Like a way for non-traders to sell their stuff or rather unique items. Just set some fees and limits making it less profitable than running your own shop as a crafter/merchant. After all in real life you don't go to the nearest auction house to buy cookies or some floor tiles. I'm sure there are reasons for this.

Some people do

Ok, nowadays some people do, but it wasn't like this before, and there's still fuss about all these walmarts killing downtown shops, so large trade centers and online shopping are quite recent inventions and are out of place in fantasy settings. I'm not saying they can't exist there - one could even argue they should, seeing all the magic around. But it's the same as the castles problem: castles should be there, even though they can easily be disintegrated, pass wall'd teleported or flown over. IMO the shops should be there, and if global auction house kills them, it should go.

And some people really want to keep shops and actually have clients.

Why not try to make auction houses like what they are in real life? Like a way for non-traders to sell their stuff or rather unique items. Just set some fees and limits making it less profitable than running your own shop as a crafter/merchant. After all in real life you don't go to the nearest auction house to buy cookies or some floor tiles. I'm sure there are reasons for this.
While I realize it is easier to buy off a global auction house teleporting stuff right to your inventory, it's too much of a loss for the game world. And I won't die if I have to buy something at a higher-than-the-lowest-possible price just because I happen to need something it right now.

Personally I completely agree that escape should be difficult, that there should be counters for escape measures, and that many cases once combat begins, 7 out of 10 times it should result in one or the other dying or surrendering. (actually a surrender mechanic could be interesting, IE a mode to go into that sheathes a sword and holds hands in the air, granting the attacker to chose to negotiate, and say trade for resources instead of killing the victim). Note I do think it still should be possible that if someone is a jerk, they might accept the surrender sacrifice, and then kill the victim anyway, he might obtain a reputation for doing so, and recieve less mercy on himself in similar situations.

Actually I agree with your whole post, and quote this only to say that a surrender mechanics would actually make a lot of sense with the announced PvP loot system. In many cases it can actually be better for both parties to resolve the matter without fighting.

There is a compromise: contested territory can only change at the end of a day or week, and all work towards contesting or defending it is totaled for that day. If a siege engine isn't destroyed the day it gets to the walls, the walls are breached.

This idea would work great with instanced fights, where it is easy to determine for what actions "victory points should be given", but as far as I can see it is not what GW is aiming for.

It could still work though, if done right, and I like this idea.

I added to this idea earlier, but it didn't seem to catch any attention. Global agenda had a good system where certain regions of the campaign map where only open for a few hours every day.

This could be done in PFO by having an 'open for attack' window set by a charter that has to be for X amount of hours every week. So charters could have a heavy defense times, and a few days break for doing large scale group activities without having to put everything at risk.

Then a system is required where charters can declare war against another charter during an 8 hour window centered at average peak population of the past month for the charter. The defending charter must open them selves up for attack during that window for a number of hours over period of time. If they don't answer or they don't stay open for attack long enough, they become attack able at any time by the attacking charter.

A balance needs to be found that will not encourage mass takeovers. The cost of war should be much higher than the cost of starting your own settlement. It should take more than 6 months to see an improvement. Hopefully GW will be unlocking hexes at a very steady rate and we will never run out of building space. There also shouldn't be a resource that is so valuable that it is worth it to wage war. Raw materials should be very abundant and the quality should be dependent on the skill of the crafters.

I would like to see organized...

Yes, this can work too, though I personally like the 24 hour alert system more, because it doesn't completely take the initiative from the attacker in favor of the defender.

Now, conquest unlimited enthusiasts here, imagine a mostly American kingdom and, say, a mostly Russian kingdom. What will the war between them be like? With no restrictions, it will most likely be a series of mass raids and takeovers encountering no resistance on its way. What do Americans do at 16:00 GMT? Studying? Sleeping? Working? Too bad, cause it's 19:00 in the most populated regions of Russia and it neighbors. And when it's 19:00 at the north coast, it's 3:00 in Moscow. So they always attack each other when it's not expected and not convenient to defend.
Now, if one kingdom knows for sure the other is planning an attack in certain time, they will at least try to organize defense.

The above is only valid if there are no regional servers like in EVE, of course.

This is something completely different from your first suggestion.

Limiting city conquest to, for example, 20.00-24.00 GMT of every day is terrible for anyone that don't live in the right time zone.
Limiting it so that the siege train, after reaching the city hex, need 24 hours of real time to set up and be ready for the attack is acceptable.

Yes, and I admitted I liked Onishi's idea even more back in post 5 of this thread. I'm not fanatic about the schedule idea, it was just the first solution that came to my mind.

Although I do understand the problems associated with limiting conquest activities, I still think they actually improve the experience if used right.

It shouldn't necessarily be the system I proposed - just any system allowing people to know they should be ready to defend some hours before the actual attack. Without such a system conquests will probably be too chaotic and timezone-dependent. And I'd like a lost battle to actually matter and have an impact for at least some time.

About artificial restrictions. There are tons of them in any game, and their main purpose is usually to compensate flaws of simulation and to make games more fun. Leaving aside the 'fun' part of it (as we obviously have different points of view on it), I believe there is an inevitable flaw in simulation that could use some compensation.

Imagine a city being attacked. A servant is knocking a knight's door: "Sir Lionhair, arm yourself and help us protect the city!" only to get a reply like "Sorry, gotta study for the tomorrow's exam", or "I'm fighting with my gf at the moment, soz", or "You know, I'm not actually at home right now".

One can't be expected to sacrifice too much for a game, so wouldn't it be nice of the developers to create a system that would at least give players an opportunity to adjust their schedule if they want to help their kingdom?

Having full unrestrained pvp is a good way to never see a mainstream population. I would like PFO to be a medium for bring people from games like WoW into the sandbox environment. After about 3-4 years the developers and the players should be able to make an environment that is friendly to gamers who don't want to risk their work.

Can't disagree with this. If I wanted EVE, I would be playing EVE right now.

One idea IMO that could be a good hybrid, because IMO it is imposible to believably say that a city can only be attacked between 7pm-9pm, or whatever the high point of traffic is,

I don't have problems with this. A lot of things are not believable enough in MMO's, like people disappearing for several days or them never really dying...

However seige weaponry itself could be NPC based, slow moving and come with say 24 hours or greater warning.

...

... But that's actually a great idea and I like it more than the strict schedule one! Hope there is no flaws I failed to notice in it ).

Blaeringr, while I'm not for excessive coddling and making ambushes almost useless, I do believe individual players could use some love.

The problem with all these hardcore pvp games is they fail to create a believable model of society where killing a person actually means something. Can't blame developers though, because in games it really doesn't. Anyway, it always results in players killing each other for NO real reason.

Such failure, or rather impossibility, to recreate the relative protection by society and morals can be considered a legitimate reason to balance the situation by helping out the victims.

Of course if Paizo manages to make safe zones large and with enough content for more peaceful players to spend 95% of their time there, then it is ok to leave the wilderness to hardcore PvP'ers with their rules.

Not sure about the money gathering side of the problem, but they should limit conquests to certain hours. This will at least give people with lives to live an opportunity to help their companies when it really counts. Of course then we have the problem of time zones etc, but IMO this is still better than 24/7 FFA.

By the way, the idea of true invisibility stealth can be viable as long as its duration is extremely short. Like swift invisibility or that ninja ability, if you know what I mean. Or several maneuvers using such invisibility. Of course such tricks are almost exclusively combat-oriented, but they could still add variety to the game.

I love gamers :D

I make a suggestion that the topic should shy away from the InfoSec portion pending actual hard choices by GW, and immediately it becomes the topic of choice. Its like trying to tell someone "Don't think of an Elephant."

Not really, it has been discussed since like post 20 or so.

Rather than view this from the purely theoretical realm of what can be done to accomodate hacks on an as of yet to be designed system, perhaps we can analyze the value from a gameplay perspective, and wether some of the proposals presented here actually advance the "fun" factor or if they are systems for the sake of being complicated.

We just assume it is not fun to be constantly defeated by cheaters and thus encouraged to use cheat programs. Especially if you level your stealth only for it to be rendered useless by hackers (and there will be a lot of hackers in any persistent world PvP game not designed to counter hacks). If there's no skill for this, it's better, but only a little.

Of course, in small encounters with casual gamers just about any sensible system will work fine. But eventually the stakes will become too high and some guild will hack, causing a chain reaction.

Then some guy who defended his PC king's lands yesterday will go to help his real life friend gather daisies in a nearby forest. And here you are, hiding in the bushes, waiting for a good moment to strike them. Except you are not actually in hiding, as that one guy who started using hacks yesterday can see you perfectly fine.

Now, other people can see you no matter how hard you try, but you still can't see other people who hid well. Isn't it unfair? Can you see the end of this story?

Likewise, even PvP matches should not be over so quickly, or leave you stun-locked for so much of it, that you never have an opportunity to flee.

That is one of my main wishes for the combat system. A 1 on 1 encounter should not end in 15 seconds, 10 of which one of the players is in stun-lock. This is one of the reasons I'm absolutely against save-or-dies.

In the middle ages, many villages (depending on the region of course) consisted of like 2-5 large houses, each home to a number of families.
So they were not even villages in the modern sense...

If GW had a huge budget to devote to the project and were building their engines from the ground up... I might try to push for them to take a chance and try to impliment some of the visibility stuff.... there are a few things that you CAN do...like SALTING the data sent to the client with false positives...so the hackers don't know which ones are real or not...or stronger packet encryption techniques along with detection software....or just keeping more of the processing on the server.... but that all would translate into alot more resources...

Oh yes, false positives... This reminds me of the time I first played Thief: The Dark Project. I was also playing UO back then and read about a first person 3D MMORPG that some company planned to release. It was like 2000 or 2001, so the game was never released of course. But I remember thinking about how could stealth be implemented in a thief-like manner. A came up with the idea of false signals (but fed to the player, not client), like footsteps or 3d-models or special effects appearing out of nowhere and simulating sneaking characters ). These signals would be partially negated by a couple of skills like Spot/Listen, of course, but one would need to invest into them to get a noticeable effect.

Oh well, it doesn't matter since it's really complicated and absolutely cannot be achieved with the use of existing middleware (using which is actually a great idea on the part of Paizo). You just reminded me of my childhood lol.

What Onishi said.

Also, if anything, TAB targeting can help implement stealth in a way. Particularly the pseudo-stealth offered by GrumpyMel. It is easy to prevent players from targeting those who are not supposed to be targeted. And no targeting means no interaction most of the times.

Now, this still doesn't prevent the PvP "radar" like issue with extra-client hacks, or packet sniffing, but that sort of thing i believe to be a technical consideration outside of the capacity for the forums to discuss. Unless one of us is currently employed by a MMO as a security expert ...

The problem is, the devs' replies clearly imply that no matter how hard you try to secure your packages, they can and will be intercepted and deciphered. So you better design mechanics with that in mind.

Should the ability to toggle the visibility of an avatar not be available, there is always the tried and trued method out in the real world; using line of sight with terrain, features, trees, other traditional methods of concealment. Without knowing the density and capacity for the game to generate such features, one can't know if this is an option, but I most certainly hope so.

It might also be worthwhile to discuss the entire purpose of stealth mechanics, and that's essentially to avoid contact with a potential enemy until a time/place of one's choosing. If there were abilities that enabled one to do so, but avoided the technically challenging aspects of visibility, would it suffice? What abilities could be implemented to this end?

Yes, such a system would be great if the engine they choose could handle it. But I think tracking lines of sight of all characters is even more loading on the server. And it still wouldn't solve the problem of third-party "mind link" programs, though it would keep hiding characters farther from potential enemies most of the time.

Still, the main problem for me is the advantage cheat programs give. I just don't like the idea of having to use them to stand a fair chance against others.
So, whatever mechanics they implement, I'd like them to include possible cheats.
I mean, if a cheat program would allow me to see an character if my ally sees it, I want the client itself to allow me do the same - just to nullify the advantage of cheating, so there is no reason to cheat anymore.

Because you're running a program that intercepts the packets sent between the client & the server and decrypts them. It then maps the location of all objects in the game space to a 3D visualization that is displayed on your 2nd monitor, giving you a "god's eye" view of the whole area. That same tool also transmits this information to everyone in your guild, updating their maps in real-time, so that they see everything you see, and vice versa. Anything known to any one of your team is therefore known by every member of your team.

Like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShowEQ

Oh - you're not using these tools? That sucks, because the people you're playing against are and that gives them an advantage you don't have.

RyanD

Wow, I never imagined how far those cheaters could go...

That really sucks, but pseudo-stealth ideas by GrumpyMel are actually quite good and could still work, maybe even combined with standard stealth. Like if no-one sees the stealthed character, even its "shadow" is not displayed. Though this would probably be an unnecessary complication.
Those damn cheaters...

I remember Ultima Online having chessboards in taverns, I even played it once. It was fun, you could even cheat by making illegal moves, as you basically moved pieces however you liked :).

Actually, make an in-game online Pathfinder framework, like Fantasy Grounds LOL.

I'm confused. Multi-classing has been around in D&D for years, yet it didn't devolve into "everyone and their badger" becoming a spell caster. Why should that happen in PFO?

Well, you know, D&D is not quite MMO, and powergaming is much more popular in MMO's, especially competitive MMO's with at least relatively free PvP. More tools means more versatility which means more power, and magic is a good toolkit.

I actually expect to see far more single-class characters pursuing their capstones, than multi-class characters.

I guess we'll see which of us turns out to be the better prophet :)

Well, I believe you're right, considering the amount of time needed to reach a capstone. And you'll be right for at least the first 3-4 years, and who knows what will the game become by this time.

So, basically, everyone and their badger is a spellcaster?
That's sad to hear, but it seems to always end up like this in skill-based systems.
I think they should encourage following archetypes by giving special features and abilities to characters staying within certain limits or something. The capstones don't count as long as they don't disappear when a character breaks these limits.

I believe stealth should be implemented provided it can be done without holes for cheaters. Even some other mechanics can be sacrifices to do this.
Basically, if a couple of spells interfere with stealth, it is better to scrap the spells than scrap stealth. The reason for this is simple: even without a couple of spells, magic in general will still work. But if you sacrifice stealth for a couple of spells, then you lose a whole game mechanics.

Reasons your client might need to know where my character is:

* I have magical effects on me that affect you.
* You have magical effects on you that affect me.
* You run in to me and collide (or vice-versa).
* A pet you control can sense me (blindsight, scent, tremorsense, etc.)

From this list, only the third point may be a real problem. I don't know how loading it is for the server to detect possible collisions, but if it requires too much resources, then it *might* be a legitimate reason to give up on stealth. But then again, in this case cheaters can bypass collision detection and ruin some other mechanics.

As for magical effect, you can make the aoe effects' centers separate entities, bound to characters' position but not the characters themselves. Players will learn to not use them when in stealth, to avoid detection.

Pets are not a problem at all. If a pet detects a hidden character, it can either give its owner a sign or just reveal the sneak - both variants are viable - at least they don't destroy stealth as a whole.

Such game-breaking things as blindsense should either not be allowed to a MMO at all or have counters.

Even stranger case: If there is a 3rd party involved who can see me, then that information can be passed to you and you will be able to know where I am as well. So being "hidden" needs to apply to every potential observer in the space, not just a subset.

Not a problem either, it's the same IRL or in P&P.

You would have to know when I opened a door or triggered a trap, or attacked or was attacked by a PvE entity; all of which reveal my location.

Again, it is this way in real life and P&P. An opening door with no-one standing nearby is a giveaway sign as it is.

In general, being "hidden" is an all-or-nothing proposition, where the server does not communicate any information about my position to your client, period. And when my "hidden" state ends, every client can access that information.

But why should it be this way? The server already filters the information it gives to individual clients based on the distance. Why can't it use one more filter based on stealth values and perception checks?

As far as stealth/invisibility from what I've heard from Ryan on the forums, it sounds like it is unlikely that stealth/invisibility will be in the game due to the difficulties of judging what and when, and the fact that clients will indefinently be hacked to show invisible characters, and the difficulty of any effects from an invisible character.

That's just too bad...

But can't the game be programmed so that the server just doesn't reveal the information on hidden characters until they are discovered? Like... every 5 seconds or so all characters perform an automatic check and send the result to the server. And the server sends the information only on the objects not hidden, or with their 'hide' values beaten by the check.
Sounds like only adding a couple more operations to me. Though multiplied by the number of players it may be a lot, I don't know.

UPD: Found the stealth thread, will post there.