So we had our first large scale tower defense. It was a lot of fun, but we also think the PvP mechanics could be changed to make more sense/be more fun. Blunt Logic obliged us tonight by trying to take one of our towers, and so we broke off our escalation hunt to engage. Some thoughts: -At first we outnumbered them--we had 7 and they had 4, and so for a while we had the advantage on them. We were able to blast them out of the tower, and they tried to lure some of us out to even the odds, which was a good tactic on their part. -They started roaming from tower to tower, which forced us to split into reconnaissance elements. Again that was a good tactic. They called in reinforcements, so for a while they had a numbers advantage and were able to repel us. -At one point they had 9 characters to our 6, and got up to around 680 or so on one of our core towers. When we had 7 to their 9, we charged in, and were able to dislodge them, although we had several casualties. We got two more, and then when it was 9-9, everytime they came in we dropped them like flies. -I think there was a decent mix of types. They were mostly bowmen, melee, and wizards. We had a similar mix, but also clerics. So it was nice to see there was more than one way the cat was being skinned. -The big surprise for us was that enemy flagging worked the opposite of what we expected. In a PvP open hex, if you attack an invading group, all your group members get flagged and turn red. So instead of being able to tab target the aggressors who are invading your tower, you tab and attack on your party members. This is particularly a problem because you then can't heal your party and comrades. So there is a huge mechanical advantage to trying to steal a tower, because they defenders can't heal/buff/help each other. I highly recommend rethinking this. -It was a lot of fun. It was good content, we are happy we repelled the invaders, getting out Player Killer Achievements, and so on. On the other hand, HAVING to PvP every night to keep your towers seems like it might become work at some point. Not saying that's a problem, just may reflect preferences. Big thanks to Blunt Logic and Allegiant Gemstone Co. for providing content--you are worthy adversaries! P.S. Gpunk, Atheory, Memory, Pendragon, Ozack, Doc and the three other dudes, please PM me, I have your missing teeth.
You have to admit it's kind of funny. Here's a game where the lead dev has said like a million times that his #1 priority is to not allow people to get their smiles from other people's frustration--that he and Lisa would tank the game before they allowed that to be viable. The OP may not be the sharpest tool in the shed ;)
Bludd, you're not making any sense. What part of this are you not getting? Ryan has explained in great detail that this is a different process than what you are used to: instead of seeing a game at 4.5 years AND LOOKING A CERTAIN WAY, you're seeing it at 2 years AND IT LOOKS A DIFFERENT WAY. That's pretty simple. I know it's new, but once you realize, "Oh, I'm used to sitting down and eating a slice of apple pie, but now I'm looking at flour, sugar, apples, etc. and it looks really differemt, because I'm at the beginning of the process, not the end," its not hard. You're evaluating an event that happened in year 2 Alpha, using criteria that would only make sense if you were looking at an event in year 4. Think of it this way: if server populations are this low in 2 years, then yes, major problem that Ryan would have some 'splaining to do. But during the super-boring, no-permanency part of Alpha testing, of course populations are low. It's expected. The moment we go to EE and we move from testing to playing/testing, you'll see a jump in population. And as over time it's more playing/more ways of playing/better play, other people will enter at their "fun tipping point," and so on.
Ozem's Vigil recently hosted "Winter is Coming: Adventure Time in the North" (props to Caldeathe for organizing and leading this). We had a great time, and I had some feedback based on our efforts.
Yeah I agree - looks like we'll need to work on that tool when the time is appropriate.No offense, but I'm confused, why do you keep changing your story? Because no human being can remember everything they have ever heard, said, done, seen, etc? Just tossing that out there as possibility.
From the blog:
My take away from that is they are going to do two things going forward: polish existing features, and improve stability/performance. I would think if they were planning on doing something else, e.g. adding new content, Ryan would have said that. Squashing bugs and making the company function/AH work well sounds like a good use of the "hold" time.
Which is a problem. It is a problem. This is the first time I've been disappointed in GW's outreach and communication. You have a set date for EE launching, but at the same time very credible questions about the viability of that start date. The crowdforgers that GW has said are so important to the development process, have asked repeatedly what's going on, and voiced their concerns. Silence on the net is the wrong response here. Even acknowledging uncertainty would be a good and fair move now. Whether it's "Hey all, we think we are on schedule, and don't plan to change the start date," or "Everything in development is fluid, and so we can't give you an answer yet"--any kind of acknowledgement and outreach would be the right the choice. I'm along for the ride--I have a lot of faith in GW, you've done a great job so far, and I'd love to see you continue the culture of openness you've established.
I know there are a lot of things (like server stability) that are at the tippity-top of the development list right now. But as we look at the bigger picture, can you good folks at GW give us any kind of scale for thinking about development of PvE beyond escalations? Things like dungeons--if you all remember the "PFO Environment Experience," something like a dungeon to explore once in a while would really be awesome. Not any scripted boss fights or anything, just something more than mobs standing in a circle outside. Is this a first 3-6mon kind of thing? 1 year+?
Cheatle, respectfully disagree--Nihimon has it right. Play-session breaking stuff needs to be fixed before EE, but not game features. My criteria is: "Over two weeks, is this going to break my game involvement?" If I run across the map and get teleported back to where I started, if I spend hours collecting stuff and suddenly lose it, if I keep falling through the shy and have to kill myself, etc. that's the kind of thing where I'm going to turn off the client and walk away for days, maybe forever. Ammo? Consumables? I'm going stop playing if everyone using range weapons has to stand still during the attack? Are any of those things going to make a meaningful difference if they get changed today o two weeks from now?
Ryan said Con is the most-bugged at the moment. Have you tried training hit points and fortitude? Cal, I can't go up in HP to get a better CON because I need a higher CON to go up in HP :) I'm going to log out for a couple of days and try Fortitude 4.
This thread is really making clear to me how tangled the user side of the design is. It looks like there are component systems that interact and have built in parallelism, but there's no lexical parallelism that would let you easily see what matches up with what. It's obviously a potentially very rich system, but it is confusing as hell.
As I and other players from Ozem's Vigil try and think through our EE characters, we've become aware of the fundamental tension between the avowed design philosophy and game mechanics for building your character. I feel like we're in a kind of a bind. The design seems to be: "Make a hard choice. This game is different than other games, where additional roles (gatherer, crafter) are added as timesinks to combat content consumption. Insted in PFO, those timesinks are career paths, and you can dabble in some, or be really good at one." But the mechanic seems to be: "Look, unlike other games, you can't just follow the path you want. We're forcing you to make this hard choice about putting character power into things that are irrelevant to your playstyle if you want to be very good at something--if you want to be an adventurer, we're forcing you to put scarce character power into side ventures like crafting and gathering, but because of the design there will be no return on investment--it's just a power sink to make your time in the game longer." As we understand it, it's a kind of lose-lose proposition, where we are forced to make a hard choice both ways, and get the worst of both worlds. I'm puzzled by this. Am I missing something, or misunderstood the system?
Could some folks share illustrative examples of keywords they have active, e.g. "I have feat X & Y trained, and am wearing armor with Keywords X, Y, P, and D. So I'm going to try and get feats P & D also." Be great to get some martial, divine, arcane and rogue examples.
Graphics - Obviously it is going to have a big impact on marketshare, and right now, the graphics aren't good. But as Nihimon points out, the delta's pretty good so far. Achievements - I see where you are coming from on this. On the one hand, GW has had this brilliant idea: get rid of the grind. Brilliant, right? But then there's weird impulse to add back in a grind or else people will just accrue exp without having to grind…which we thought was the brilliant idea in the first place. If achievements could be expanded enough so that they were an incentive to explore the world, rather than a gatekeeper, I think that would work. Classes - Again, I see where you are coming from. This is one of those things that makes some sense, but in practice doesn't seem to work. People use the word class all the time. "Class + Multi-class" might be a better way of explaining PFO to newcomers. PVP - Agree that this needs to happen eventually. If the game is heavily PvE while we build the social world, and then we move into more and more PvP, I'm ok with that. Crafting and Drops - No, no no no! The best thing this game has going for it, really right now the only thing it has going for it, is the social interdependence of having a resource gathering/crafting cycle. The worst possible mistake GW could make right now is add basic drops in, and help people solo. The exact opposite of the game design model. Allow a Focus - Agree. It's kind of weird again--the game right now is fun because I like to run out and whack monsters and collect resources, and my friend likes to stay back at town and make me stuff. Why force us to cross-train for the stuff we don't like, against the grain of interdependence? Makes no sense.
I'm pretty grateful for the girl who shows up in this video. Edited because of Nihimon's edit :p
1) I do think the economy loop from adventuring/gathering to crafting is fun and engaging, and gives groups of players a purpose. I think if you can make that part of the game a little smoother, you'll get folks to pay for subscriptions while the rest goes in. Finding recipes was cool, and meaningful. Being able to craft something for your friends is meaningful. 2) That being said, combat animations/sounds/feel is so clunky I am kind of worried. I'm more about gameplay than graphics, but I'm worried about my guildies who are currently launching in Archaeage. I don't think that game will solve the gameplay and design problems that PFO is meant to get around, but the gap in graphics is so enormous that I worry my friends will be like "Holy crap this is 16-bit--no way." 3) Tooltips, but you know that. 4) Maps. Wow are the maps…not useful. The large map is muddy, indistinct, and difficult to relate to the world you see in the client. It looks like someone blew up a really low-res top down screenshot of the world, and I hate it. I hate the mini-map slightly less, but only slightly. 5) Related to the above: please make it easier to find you party. "Hey, since none of us can see each other on the map, and the map is so indistinct and is unlabeled, let's all try and go to the hex that is three hexes east of, and up one from Sotterhill, at the southern tip of that hex, where it looks like there is a road going into the hex." How about some arrows and stuff so we can find each other? It really lowers the social engagement of the game. 6) Please let me arrange my hotbar buttons: I am sick of healing healing monsters by accident. I udnerstand that there is some sort of rationale between the three slots on the left vs. the ones on the right, but it means that I have hostile/friendly stuff mixed, when I would like to widely separate them. 7) Reputation: do we really want it to be that easy to lose that easily by accident in your party? In the middle of combat with some ogres, I somehow (I think it was mouse-look) targeted a party member, hit him like 8 times (combat animation is bad I had no idea what was happening), and suddenly I'm a murderhobo with -4060 reputation, and I only knew because my friend pointed it out. A system where you can effortlessly, instantly engage the harshest penalties by accident, without being aware of it, sounds like a bad system to me. But I'm prolly just crazy like that.
Sorry, but your personal dislike of the name isn't a big deal or a reason to change. Keeping class names like Expert, Commoner, Aristocrat is one of the many small ways GW is retaining the flavor of the Pathfinder IP. Beyond that, the name is pretty unimportant. What matters is how the game allows us to play a role like a commoner: a savvy and forceful teamster, a hard-driving foreman running a lumber camp, etc. That's where the juice is.
Hard to see how this makes any sense:
I'm excited to see we're continuing to grow--we just passed Aragon to take back 7th place in the Landrush (at least for now!). We're still hoping to find more folks who are interested in:
Not we would say no to fellow LG fighters and clerics, but we have some folks who want to go in the above directions, and want to strengthen their ranks.
That's the heart of the matter. "Hey wouldn't it be cool if I could have this really powerful race?" means that everyone would want to have that powerful race. There are a lot of ways DMs can control powergamers, but in an MMO it's just not doable.
Many of us are former/current military members, and know that "me" people aren't leaders--a large part of leadership is selflessness and focus on others. It's why military socialization includes punishing over-use of both "Me" language and "Me" conduct.I'm curious about one point - do you think that leadership is universal? That is, are the traits required to be an excellent leader in a 21st Century/First World military heirarchy match those required to be an excellent military leader in the Civil War/Napoleonic era, or in the Middle Ages? Or does the existing social structure of a society have bearing on the traits that make a great leader? That's an interesting question Urman. On the one hand, there are powerful cultural and material differences between Genghis Khan's context and that of Admiral Nelson, or Gen. Mattis, and I wouldn't skip over that. But there is clearly a lot of similarity as well--we have good historical data on 19th-17th century military leaders, again good records for a lot of Roman military leaders, decent textual sources for Hellenic leaders, etc. And yea, I think there is a lot that is comparable. I was a young Marine infantryman (0311) when Gen. Al Gray implemented maneuver warfare as the Marine Corps warfighting doctrine, and when I become an officer, my class at TBS was one of the first to be trained under the new syllabus and doctrine. We read a lot, but the core text in our curriculum that we came back to again and again was Shaara's Killer Angels, the classic novel of Gettysburg, and just prior to the "9 day war" culminating exercise, we went up to Gettysburg and walked the battlefield, got to know the dirt. The reason was that this battle offered some of the best examples available of American military leadership. The Marine Corps wants leaders like Joshua Chamberlain: leaders who's virtues and skills transcend the technology and circumstances of their era. If you have a chance, read Gates of Fire, not necessarily for pure historical accuracy, but for the portrait of shared suffering and privation (particularly in the Agoge) that marks military cohesion then and now, and which leaders of any age bear first and foremost on their shoulders.
In another thread, one of our more vocal self-proclaimed leaders was referencing their vast PvP experience, and I was struck but the high levels of "Me" language in their posts (I, me, my, etc.) Many of us are former/current military members, and know that "me" people aren't leaders--a large part of leadership is selflessness and focus on others. It's why military socialization includes punishing over-use of both "Me" language and "Me" conduct. This points to something critical that most people complaining about the Towers mechanic are missing: while the mechanic does favor numbers, numbers are very hard. The larger any political unit, the more/more difficult political problems become, and the more critical leadership, a scarce commodity, becomes. The real limit on mega-settlements is the very low probability of an on-line Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, etc. appearing. I think it's more likely we'll find that there's a tension between leadership desire/availability and leadership skills and virtues. The best leaders among us may have lots of fish to fry in the RL, and while they might be very committed to the game as a hobby or outlet, they won't be at full on mom's basement level. At the heart of political problems is seemingly distinct, often contradictory needs in the group, the very sort of thing GW is deliberately forcing on is (e.g. 2/3rds of us want a combat role template, while 1/3 of us want a craft template). It is very difficult to come up with creative political solutions to these sorts of problems, and the complexity and number of political problems increases with the size of the polity. If GW truly does force us to make meaningful choices (and I have confidence they will), then that acts as a natural brake to settlement growth, and moves us away from a scenario where there are two giant factions fighting each other, and into one where there are many factions, each carefully trying to simultaneously juggle the needs of their own polity and the complex dance of shifting alliances and relationships between factions. "I've brought Elfstar to become a priestess and a witch."
That's the wrong language to use--if you're using quantity as a measure here, you have a fundamental misconception of the game. There can't be too much or too little PvP conflict in a kingdom game--rather, it can be of right or wrong kind. As Ryan has pointed out, oh like a thousand times, player A and player B will experience willy varying amounts of PvP interactions, by design. The question is only whether the design and development of the sandbox leads to meaningful, interesting, and engaging interactions. THE INTENSE OCCULT TRAINING THROUGH D&D PREPARED DEBBIE TO ACCEPT THE INVITATION TO ENTER A WITCHES' COVEN.
So spot on. We at Ozem's Vigil are fully planning on taking over the world with buck-nekked clerics and fighters. Yep, that's our plan. "You mean you're going to teach me how to have the real power?"
To the Devs:
2) I particularly appreciate that you've given us a chance to practice. I see this as a training wheels (scaffolded) way to practice territory acquisition, alliance building, diplomacy, and the political arithmetic of making constrained choices. 3) One question that came up last night in TSV's chat was whether your score could be free-spent: do we get X points to spend as we please, or does our score qualify us for some sort of template of initial buildings? 4) Have you thought about upkeep costs at the start of OE? If a settlement is successful in the TW, could they be put in the position of being unable to maintain their initial suite of buildings? To My Fellow Players:
2) Also maybe have a tiny bit of faith? I don't mean just accept everything that falls from the mouths of Devs--our job here is to constructively push back and engage. But for those of you freaking out, do you think that overnight Ryan, Lee etc. just went mental? These are pretty sharp people who have thought through very carefully how to solve the MMO problem and give us a long-term gaming solution, and they've engaged in dialogue with us in a way that I have never experienced before. They've earned some trust. "NO, NOT BLACK LEAF! NO, NO! I'M GOING TO DIE! Please don't make me quit the game! Somebody save me! You can't do this!"
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