theStormWeaver's page

Basically, right now, it feels like there are no reasonable precautions that can be taken to avoid PvP. Borders mean nothing. Proximity to allied Settlements means nothing. During the Kickstarter pitch, they indicated that PvP averse characters would have options, that being closer to Settlements would offer greater safety but lower opportunity for reward. No mechanic to support that balancing act exists, and there are no mechanics on the road map to support it.

I have no personal problem with PvP, I just wasn't ready to wade into the game's damn near opaque mechanics in order to be ready for it. The game isn't worth the time investment right now.

I'm not leaving the game. But I like Mourn and Sakina, they were good people and it was fun logging in once a week to hit escalations around BWG. Not having that anymore is going to make it a little harder to motivate myself into playing PFO.

A friend of mine who is in BWG but is not active on the forums asked me to post this.

My guildmates and I discovered why PvP outside of The Window is fundamentally broken last night.

We're a small guild: half a dozen players who go on PFO once a week as a group; we chat, joke, kill mobs, gather mats, and craft. We enjoy it, even with some of PFO's rough edges.

Last night, we discovered that we'd lost the game.

A party of PvP-ers waited around until we'd spent about an hour killing and harvesting, and were heading back to town. They killed and looted each one of us at least once, even when we were all together in an 8-person-strong quasi-party. They were able to do this because PvP is the winning strategy in PFO.

How is PvP the "I Win button"?

1: their build is more XP-efficient: our 8 characters have spent XP in combat areas, gathering areas, and crafting areas. We're "well-rounded" characters. They spent all of their XP on cranking up pure combat effectiveness. Thus, in a fight, they are more powerful and will win virtually every time.
2: we've "wasted" XP that can never be gotten back: no one in our party will ever be able to stand toe-to-toe with one of the PVP-ers we encountered. They have the edge now, and we will always have thousands fewer XP to spend on combat abilities due to having spent it on gathering and crafting.
3: we had discovered a handful of new-to-us recipes and spells, which they now have
4: therefore, PvP-ers can kill PvE-ers basically at will, with very little chance of repercussion. Because they can do so, they needn't spend XP on gathering skills; thus, they have more XP to spend on combat abilities, thus they can more easily kill PvE-ers and bring their ill-gotten mats back to town where one or two characters can fulfill all of the refining/crafting roles.
5: we can also never catch up because we can't learn the spells or recipies we need to become powerful enough to defend ourselves.

This is a positive feedback loop for the PvP-ers: the more PCs they kill, the more able they are to kill more PCs.

This sets up a negative feedback loop for the PvE-ers: the more they die to PVP-ers, the less able they are to build up enough strength (ie., craft more powerful items or learn more powerful spells) to protect themselves in the future _and_ they lose what protections they already have, to boot (ie., their equipped gear loses durability even while they lose all of the mats they've gathered).

PvP outside of The Window also discourages friendly encounters with strangers: once you (or your party members) have been killed by two or three random PCs, you start to assume that all unknown PCs are out for your blood. Thus, you start to avoid unknown PCs, building up an insular community. This stands in direct opposition to the goal of encouraging PCs to drive the game through communication and trade.

PvP outside of The Window also removes any possibility of playing PFO as a casual or PvE game. The only possible way to not continually die to PvP-ers is to follow their tactics and become the very thing that is draining the fun out of PFO.

At the end of the day, no one likes being beaten up and having their lunch money stolen. With PvP outside of The Window, becoming a bully and stealing the lunch money of others is the only way to play.

PvP needs to be restricted to The Window for PFO to be viable in the long-term. PvP griefers (because, let's be honest: that's what they are) suck the fun out of the game. Fundamentally, people play games to have fun. Thus, PvP harms the long-term viability of PFO.

Please add Guurzak to the list.

And its not sufficient to go out in force. Members of BWG were out tonight in a group of 7 and it was insufficient. We were not prepared for PvP and got our proverbial asses handed to us.

The worst part, was that even if we had killed them (repeatedly), it would have done little good. They weren't carrying any items other than their gear, so they stood to lose almost nothing. They were killing for the giggles.

With 6 favorites, the second thread for my company topped out. But thats boring, so here's the second highest at a whopping 3.

Koinonia Emporou has agreed to be Blackwood Glade's merchant arm.
Anything that Blackwood needs that it cannot provide for itself, we shall obtain through trade.

We look forward to the mutually profitable arrangement.

But then we went and changed our name to the Blackwood Trading Company.

I also like echo chambers. +1

There, fixed it for you ;)

Stability, tool-tips, and icons.

Who cares if the animations are slightly off if the game still crashes or de-syncs players?

I played for four hours last night and there were people in the chat constantly talking about how they couldn't interact with enemies, that they weren't taking damage, etc.

Three times a party member died because everyone else was de-synced and didn't know it before we attacked a group of enemies. Telling people to re-log or travel to another hex might work is not good enough.

I don't know what half of the feats actually do because the tool-tips are almost unreadable. The tool-tip window needs to be opaque, and the non-attack feat tool-tips need to have word-wrap.

The lack of icons makes it difficult to know what I actually have in my attack bar. Compared to animations, this is almost trivial work.

Fluid animations are a nice to have in a Beta, it is way easier to overlook less than awesome graphics in a Beta. What's hard, nay, impossible, to overlook is game-breaking bugs.

Now, saying all that, I really enjoyed playing the game and look forward to knocking down some escalations and crafting some stuff.

We got there in mostly one piece once Avari and someone else named Locas Took joined us as escort and we stopped attacking every single mob group that we crossed paths with.

Afterward Avari tagged along with two of us that decided to keep playing as we wandered neighboring hexes for kills and nodes.

We even managed to destroy a goblin camp with an Ogre Clubhand on a hill between Blackwood and the settlement marked as Arkhaven on this map http://file3.guildlaunch. net/402055/testMap004.png

Today at 8:30 Central time (U.S.) 4 members of Koinonia Emporou will be gathering near the starting villages to begin a great migration toward Blackwood Glade. I'm offering for anyone who wants to move from the starting areas on to the southern part of the map to come along for all or part of the journey.

Since BWG is many hexes away, It will likely take a couple of hours, and thus we may need to do this over two or three attempts, depending on various participants schedules.

In the interest of not leaving anyone stuck in the middle of the wilderness, we'll probably be quitting whenever the first person has to leave. We'll try to end each leg of the journey in a town, so we can continue in smaller groups if scheduling makes it difficult for everyone to come on at the same time again.

Look for a wizard named Gismar (that's me) in Marchmont. With luck the other three will also be in Marchmont, but if not the first leg of the journey might just be getting everyone to the same place. If we need to get everyone together first, we'll group up in Rathglen and Marchmont and then head to The Iron Gauntlet before moving on to BWG.

We'll be on the T7V's Team Speak server for chat.

While your point is a good one Caldeathe, I think this is where the very large Settlement populations come in. Ryan has made it clear that Settlements will not be viable unless they have hundreds of citizens. I think that this is, in part, because they would need that many to keep up a solid defense during their PvP window.

Not to mention Fruben's point.

Honestly, everything I want from an MMO I'm getting/will get from PfO. Life is Feudal lost me when I saw that it was an MMO, and that LiF: YO was significantly less feature rich.

I would have loved to get a bunch of my friends (meat space and otherwise) from all over to participate in a LiF server, I would even have been willing to be the one who bank-rolled it.

I had a 1 hour soft-ban years ago on WoW for discovering a lag bug in Shat'Rath that let me get the Alliance PvP Quartermaster in combat so the enemy couldn't queue up for Arena.

Ran out of arrows and then the GM teleported me into some lava and told me to sit in time-out and think about what I've done. Learned some good lessons over that cup of noodles.

That is an awesome story, thanks for sharing.

In most games I play solo only because I get tired of having to listen to overly elitist / bossy players. The kind of people who map out every encounter in most MMO's and know step by step how to cheat through it just to finish it. If the people in this MMO roleplay then it will make anyone who likes pathfinder gravitate to groups. If they concentrate on stats and items etc then groups will become tactical and more like eve and you will see a lot of solo crafters. The way players act about the game decides the level of interaction between strangers.

We will certainly have both kinds of players, but my sincere hope is that the balance will come out (strongly) in favor of the role players. When it goes the other way it tends to cascade, driving out the role players and leaving behind only the Others.

Paint.Net is good thought I have been mostly using GIMP recently and it seems more robust.

Not surprised, Paint.Net is almost 15 years old now.

Elf Sorcer(er|ess), if it does crafting it'll be something sorc-y.

My alt will probably also be an elf and be a crafter. Not sure what kind yet, haven't looked too deep into the options.

(I'm going all-elf because Blackwood Glade is an RP elf-haven/colony)

Well, let that get to me. Shouldn't have done that.

My point was, don't go to KFC looking for Pizza.

Armor currently doesn't directly change movement speed. Encumberence doesn't exist yet, but will affect speed.

Many attacks apply or conditionally apply stacks of Slowed, which does what it says.

Are you sure about that Decius? Because I thought I noticed a slight move speed reduction (about 15%) after putting on medium armor.

You need to find out who put the huge electro-magnets near the servers. That should stop that kind of thing in the future. :-)

So did anyone else see Scorpion last night? ;-)

More likely red bull ;)

Or, as we say at work, someone knocked the server over.

Andius the Afflicted wrote:

Yes. I believe there is an update/patch happening at the moment.

Not sure about patch .. Ryan mentioned some weirdness with the system and cycling as a way to fix it ... Patch/upgrade would be fantastic that I didn't get that impression from the in-game announcement.

This is it, there were a bunch of, what appeared to be, de-sync issues. Enemies weren't reacting in combat, people were unable to login with certain toons but could with others, that kind of stuff.

There is no balancing of solo and group play because the game is not meant to be played solo. The whole point of the game is meaningful social interaction, and being a solo player is not meaningful or social.

I'm covered guys.

I'll take an alpha invite, if any are willing to part with one.

Seems to me the scarcity of some resources in some areas is probably deliberate to encourage trade. An example being the "yew is East and pine is West" situation in Alpha 8.

A salvaging mode would bypass this feature that is meant to enforce inter-settlement trade allowing people to be isolationist and try and create self sufficient settlement islands .

Why? You have not demonstrated this in the slightest.

That's terrible.

I'd rather its because they have territorial ambitions than "just 'cause." Can we at least inject some role play into our RPG people?

If you want conquest, make a conquest-centric nation.

Pathfinder elves are not Tolkien elves; they aren't the perfect race from which lesser races developed.

Pathfinder elves are literally from a different planet. They should look alien because they are literally aliens, and I think making their proportions slightly off is a great way to make that happen.

They are still supposed to be beautiful and graceful. Their description and racial bonuses are evidence enough of that.

Still though, early Alpha, give it some time. There's no need to be insulting about it (not you Decius, your a champ ;))

I think this is a great idea.

I think people are overestimating the amount of PvP that will be happening in the first couple years. Unless you expect to start feuds and wars because you are bored?

PvP may be the main focus, but the PvE shouldn't be a chore. Adding a little bit of reward in the form of ruined materials will make it feel less so.

Who in the Everbloom Alliance is going for crafting/trade? My people will need a place to train if our home (Blackwood Glade) goes Fighter/Cleric.

The construction of firearms is supposed to be a state secret of Alkenstar, I think.

All great points, but all missing the crux of the matter.

The OGL (which Pathfinder is licensed under, as part of the d20 system) gives WotC exclusive rights to use the d20 rules in electronic gaming.

PfO can't use the Pathfinder rules.

I wasn't thinking semi-transparent, but a hashed(hatched?) overlay.

Like this: http://sitemaker .umich.edu/mladjov/files/francia814a.jpg

I'd like to recommend using a hashed overlay instead of solid colors for "owned" hexes. This way we'd still be able to see the terrain/hex info (meteor hexes, forest or plains, etc.)

Thanks for this map, and good luck on the update!

I recommend jQuery and Underscore.js

RAM is cheap, go for the two 8gb sticks. Its unlikely that you'll ever need more than 16gb in that machine, but just in case. Not to mention that, unless you have the Professional version of Windows, the max you can use is 16gb (unless, of course, you are using Mac, where i have zero knowledge).

If you can swing it, I would go for a slightly beefier cpu to give your machine some staying power.

To all of you claiming it would be against lore, look at Thornkeep.
'Nuff said.

I am more excited than ever for EE in ~2 weeks.

I met Lisa and Ed Greenwood at GenCon!

There is simply too much in the field labeled "democracy" to usefully discuss it using that term.

Because Democracy is a classification of systems. If you want to talk about Democracy you should differentiate between, say, Representative Democracy and a Pure Democracy.

I'd love to see a PVP flag introduced "Spoiling for a fight" or some such that a player can fly effectively inviting others to engage him in PVP. Anyone attacking someone flying the "Spoiling for a fight" flag suffers no loss of rep, though they may incur alignment penalties say if the settlement has outlawed brawling.

And we could call it "Come at me bro!"

I'd like to say that I understand some of your apprehension in regard to Nihimon's questions. They seem very suspect.

However, when KE (the company formerly known as Pax Mercatorum) was dealing with T7V and considering our move to Phaeros, they implored us to not vote if we had voted for one of the winners in the first phase.

They (Nihimon and Cheatle, I believe) were quite adamant that they not game the system in any way. I think Nihimon is being honest here.

But then again, why should any of you trust me?

Nihimon wrote:

I believe they're still planning on some kind of Salute/Rebuke system where you can directly impact another character's Reputation by spending some of your own. That in itself might result in some Reputation costs for overusing S&D.

When would anyone who has just been SAD'd, perhaps even for a very reasonable amount, /Salute the bandit?

What if a person who accepts a reasonable SAD or rejects it, and then turns around a Rebukes the bandit, doesn't that undermine the Dev's intent in the SAD system?

Can the /salute system be spammed to game the reputation system?

Can the /rebuke system be abused by a settlement leader who demands that all of the citizens pays a "tax" in the form of /salute for him or he can demand the citizens /rebuke a selected target without just cause?

Too many possibilities for abuse, especially with the ability to multibox and roll free alts.

I'd be +7500 in a weekend, yes my alts do love me that much!!

Seeing as I'm not an a*~+~*%, and assuming you aren't being an a%&~~~! when you rob me, I'd probably /salute you.

The harvester dying is a result of not making meaningful choices. Hiring guards, having a pick up schedule, not going out alone, scouting the area... all meaningful choices. Dying because you failed to coordinate, plan, and execute is not meaningful. Dying after doing those things, because you failed in some but not all, is not meaningless. Its a learning experience. Dying because you didn't do any of those is not meaningful, its ignorance and the event hopefully will enlightn you.

This is incorrect, they made a meaningful choice to *not* take those precautions. Or they made the meaningful choice to *not* become acquainted with harvester best practices (taking precautions). At some level, that player who was killed and robbed made a choice that prevented them from being prepared.

theStormWeaver wrote:

T7V Jazzlvraz wrote:

I'm not sure the Gods would suspend their consideration of murdering unflagged innocents as an evil act just because of "ooh! shiny!" metal.

Its not just shiny, its radioactive and has bizarre properties. Each metal was also associated to one of the 7 schools of Thassilonian magic, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch for it to affect your behavior.

Also, the gods don't have a say in your alignment. Alignment is a law of physics, just like Universal Gravitation.

Wow.

*tips hat*

That's the best damn RP centered argument that supports FFA PvP in skymetal hexes yet.

Even if you are against the idea, I commend you sir.

Thank you!

I actually think that something to encourage PvP in Starfall hexes is worth considering, but I don't think it should be implemented out of the gate.

If it seems that competition in Starfall hexes isn't strong enough, incentives should be laid down. The various star metals are some of the rarest and most valuable substances on Golarion, competition for these should be intense and violent.

I'm not sure the Gods would suspend their consideration of murdering unflagged innocents as an evil act just because of "ooh! shiny!" metal.

Its not just shiny, its radioactive and has bizarre properties. Each metal was also associated to one of the 7 schools of Thassilonian magic, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch for it to affect your behavior.

Also, the gods don't have a say in your alignment. Alignment is a law of physics, just like Universal Gravitation.

The problem with "optional system to get a better result" is that, in the kind of competitive crafting market we're trying to set up, that quickly stops being truly optional. You either use the system, even if you hate it, or you're less effective than the people that are using it.

Did you know that you can alter your robots.txt file to nuke all your posts from archive.org? I did not, and it turns out that sucks, because I wanted to link an old article that talks about mini-games in crafting and can't find it on the internets anymore. But I'll attempt to summarize: quite a lot of people that are into crafting are major socializers as well. Crafting in most MMOs is relaxed enough to let you think and socialize while you're doing it. The kind of crafter that was into that HATED the Everquest 2 actiony minigame because it turned a relaxing game system into a tense one that left no time for what they generally liked to do during crafting. And it's possible the kind of person the EQ2 system appealed to still preferred the combat system, so trying to make their crafting more actiony may have not convinced players that didn't normally craft to craft, but it probably drove off a lot of players that normally craft.

But I acknowledge that the request wasn't for an EQ2 mini-game, but a more relaxed mini-game that's more like a puzzle than a combat. I'm all for that kind of thing, but I think the system already does quite a lot of that once you get your skill up and have a wider variety of inputs. The internal feedback on the system is that it might already be a little too fiddly, so hopefully our alpha players will, before we're done, manage to dig deeply enough into it to decide whether there's already enough/too much "puzzle" in getting the most efficient outputs or whether there's room to add in some more layers of puzzle.

All good points. But I still believe the issue of the actual crafting part, the acts of refining and crafting things, being incredibly boring "click, wait for bar to fill up, click again" snooze-fests in every game ever should be looked at.

The lore of the River Kingdoms area is rich with monsters...and some are TOUGH!

The waters near Mosswater are infested with merrow and are merciless attackers, so far successfully preventing anyone from reestablishing the ruins as a habitable settlement.

Loric Fells is fairly close and has Mohrgs, scrags, river trolls, and other monstrous creatures.

The forests os the Echo Wood will have goblins, wargs, morghs, scrags, shambling mounds, loads of spiders, all sorts of aquatic creatures.

Within the River Kingdoms are the areas of Lambreth, Protectorate of the Black Marquis and Tymon (a lady named Lisa wrote about Tymon in the Guide to the River Kingdoms...she posts here) so you could expect to see people and monsters from all those areas. Ustalav and Numeria will certainly be sending parties to investigate things in the Echo Wood, and Razmir already has.

Wooo! Razmir!

Razmiran is probably one of my favorite parts about the Lake Encarthan region, and I can't wait for an AP around toppling Thronestep.

I'd like to see some serious effort put into making the crafting system interesting. If crafting is intended to be a viable play style in its own right, it needs to be interesting. Watching a bar fill up is incredibly dull, even if the rest of the mechanics are deep (i love the whole idea of material quality and skills affecting the final product, for instance).

An optional mini-game of some variety, with high skill at it resulting in a small bonus to Quality, would be an ideal way to keep it from becoming mind-numbing for those who run crafter.

theStormWeaver wrote:

Dammit, I wish I had gotten into Alpha... :(

Not too late! You can upgrade on the Goblinworks site and jump right in! There is months of Alpha still to go.

-Lisa

I'm going to have to seriously consider that, thanks Lisa!

Even in a settlement which specifically EXCLUDES support, i.e. chooses to support the MINIMUM number of things they can, SEVEN classes are still supported. There are only 4 classes in Alpha. There are only 11 core classes in all of Pathfinder.

This is why I'm no longer concerned. The overwhelming majority of Roles can still be supported, with very little effort.

-- snip --

Caught up to the discussion. My point is no longer valid.

My point was that removing limited support offers a simple way to make settlement non-dependent on each other: Train up, then ditch the others. They don't have to be murderhermits (murderhobos are homeless, silly), but they're still a big, powerful group that doesn't need to have dealings with anybody. They can just focus on holding lots of POIs.

Also, Cleaverton can add members: Other high-level players who see Cleaverton is doing really, really well by not having to invest in training newcomers.

Not everyone will be as extreme as Cleaverton, but this can still happen: Train up to a satisfying level and then stop making deals.

But even then they still won't be playing "solo." They'll be playing with the other couple hundred members of their settlement. Even if they hold lots of PoIs they are participating in the territorial control portion of the game, and that is MHI.

I think your murderhoboville is a perfectly valid style of play, and would make a really interesting part of the game world and the political fabric of the Crusader Road region.

I agree with Guurzak, this strongly encourages the establishment of medium to large nations, and it encourages them to stick together. It actively *discourages* any dynamism or break-ups of large powers. That is the exact opposite of what they are stating as their goal.

Someone earlier mentioned the idea of scaling DI costs for larger nations, and I think that is an excellent idea. The skill role support idea is rubbish.

Xananaphia Turam, my LE Drow Stormborn Sorceress from the Rise of the Runelords game i'm in right now. Her favorite spell is Excruciating Deformation. Wrong spell to pick in a game where the primary antagonists are giants, however. Freakin' fort saves...