Goblin Squad Member
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Within the context of this topic what I mean by tracking is game systems designed to assist you in discerning the location of other players.
This is a single server game that will have thousands of players constantly coming on and offline. Trying to locate another player will often be like trying to find a needle in a haystack that may or may not be there when you find it's location.
Time is money and without a good system for tracking other players bounty hunters and assassins will quickly end up deciding there are easier ways to get both money and PvP.
Tracking is also a powerful counter to stealth, a skill which traditionally dominates in Open World PvP environments.
Scrying- this could allow you to see through the perspective of another character. While you would retain you own GUI and chat window this would be a great way to learn where they are and what they are doing.
Locate Creature- I imagine that this could work a lot like locate soul from Wurm Online.
Survival- This is a tough one, and while I have some ideas on how it shouldn't be done, I'm also not sure my idea is practicle. Here's my best suggestion:
The server could track the movement of players as they run along drawing a line to represent their movements like the lines left on your map in Guild Wars. After a certain ammount of time (say an hour) that line is deleted. A player can initiate the tracking skill and make check to see if they are able to pick up any of the trails of players who have been through recently. That brings up a menu with the name of any players they successfully spot.
When they select a trail it shows a glowing line on the ground with footprint makes on ot indicating the direction the player was moving when they left that trail. It also varies in color from neon green to deep blue with neon green being incredibly recent and deep blue meaning that part of the trail is about to expire.
The game will automatically make a new check every minute and on each new terrain type to determine if you can continue seeing the trail.
I like your concept for the survival thing, though, I think it would have to be more specific to a character... but really, you'd have to use one of the other ones first, before you could pick the trail up in most cases. Locate creature might be a bit OP.
Also, scrying shows you a top-down view of your victim I believe, not a first-person view. Just thought I should point that out, though I suppose a first-person view could work...
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Goblin Squad Member
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As a side note, if if scrying were to make it in, detect scrying would be an awesome counter. To make it work I would have it as a passive ability in a utility slot where if you succeed you get an option to activate it, and you get a screenshot/bearing on the player who tried to scrying you after doing so. That way you don't have an image of them pop up and block your view in the middle of a heated battle.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Survival- This is a tough one, and while I have some ideas on how it shouldn't be done, I'm also not sure my idea is practicle. Here's my best suggestion:The server could track the movement of players as they run along drawing a line to represent their movements like the lines left on your map in Guild Wars. After a certain ammount of time (say an hour) that line is deleted. A player can initiate the tracking skill and make check to see if they are able to pick up any of the trails of players...
Stephen Cheney has already weighed in on a lot of issues about breadcrumbs and tracking. *activates Nihimon ring*
Keeping track of where every player goes all the time in case they get tracked is too much strain on the servers. Likewise showing you the exact path they took recently.
The door still seemed open for checking where the character is at the time they begin getting tracked and displaying a path leading to their current location on successful checks even if it's not the exact route the quarry took.
Even if it's not there on opening day I think scrying and detect scrying should have a place in a D&D sandbox game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well Scrying sounds quite powerful. I'm not sure if scrying would be hackable however?
My idea for a Druid skill that specializes in "surveillance" is "Warg" ability to be able to put the druid's spirit into a bird such as a Raven and fly around a range from the Druid's resting body spying from this eye-in-the-sky vantage point? The good thing here is that the Druid's resing body en situ is vulnerable, but can experience flight (which is a fun experience and very in character/skill path) can perform this action cctv style (perhaps at the risk of being shot if flying down too close of detected perched in a tree etc or circling too low which would lose the "familiar" that has been invested in for this activity (cost) as well as perhaps spirit damage (injury). There's also a range from the druid's body so they have to hide somewhere if not the immediate vicinity then locally at least so it's not too OP. The best thing is that it allows flying without transportation and thus does not break the rules of trivializing travel distances. Equally it allows spying and searching and players might want to hide in forests to avoid detection etc.
I've a few more tricks for Druids but that would be for that future thread!
Concerning tracking as Proxima Sin says, there was some feedback from Stephen on this topic:
Steps in the snow are also almost certainly client only.
I'm not saying tracking is off the table, just that doing it by maintaining a detailed list of every character's previous locations is likely not going to happen. Getting approximate current location of your target interpreted to you via a medium of your skills, distance, etc. is certainly possible.
We don't currently expect to automatically give you a list of everyone nearby.
Watchtowers and hideouts might give capabilities something like that. If so, it's more likely to be something resulting from an active search by someone in the building than a passive capability added to every allied character in the hex. But we need to do more development on those.
We most likely will have a fairly typical team UI that lets you see their hit points (if they're within a certain range) and location on the map.
So it sounds like in part from strategic building functionality eg look-out vantage points and concerning tracking the bounty-hunter ability to zero-in *somehow* on their target.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Stephen Cheney has already weighed in on a lot of issues about breadcrumbs and tracking. *activates Nihimon ring*
*grins*
Actually, I think it was a post of mine from Crowdforging: Subjects to bring up in the future quoting the blog about Tracking that prompted Andius to start this thread :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Maybe for 'Survival' Tracking, if the Player can make a 'Spot' check better than the other player's 'Hide' check, they can find some footprints? And of course, this would be on a timer of some kind.
from there, then enter 'tracking mode' in which they gain a stacking bonus to keep tracking that player, but become easier for other players/NPCs to surprise?
The Player being tracked leaves 'footprints' for the other player to follow, only visible by that player.
Running over rocks makes it harder for them to track you, running through a river can potentially wipe out your tracks, so they'll have to course up and down the river-banks to find your trail again, with that timer ticking down in the process.
Running through sand, grass or similar surfaces would make it easier for them to track you in turn.
The same process could also be applied to NPCs, which would be neat.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well Scrying sounds quite powerful. I'm not sure if scrying would be hackable however?
My idea for a Druid skill that specializes in "surveillance" is "Warg" ability to be able to put the druid's spirit into a bird such as a Raven and fly around a range from the Druid's resting body spying from this eye-in-the-sky vantage point? The good thing here is that the Druid's resing body en situ is vulnerable, but can experience flight (which is a fun experience and very in character/skill path) can perform this action cctv style (perhaps at the risk of being shot if flying down too close of detected perched in a tree etc or circling too low which would lose the "familiar" that has been invested in for this activity (cost) as well as perhaps spirit damage (injury). There's also a range from the druid's body so they have to hide somewhere if not the immediate vicinity then locally at least so it's not too OP. The best thing is that it allows flying without transportation and thus does not break the rules of trivializing travel distances. Equally it allows spying and searching and players might want to hide in forests to avoid detection etc.
I've a few more tricks for Druids but that would be for that future thread!
I don't think it would be hackable. The server shouldn't send you any input from the character you are trying to scry unless you activate the ability. I don't really see anyway to force the game to scry for you without actually scrying because of that.
I like the druid ability you suggest, though I'm also not sure I see anything unbalanced about the druid taking a bird form through wildshape. Also it sounds an awful lot like controlling a familiar which sorcerers, wizards/witches all get don't they? The nice part about your druid ability is that you can't magically block it, while scrying and locate creature obviously have counters. So even though it's less efficient, it's a more reliable method.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah, just checking concerning eg computer's web-cams can be used, afterall. I like the idea of scrying and magically protecting against that a lot!
Well the idea is to ensure the Druid cannot fly as flying I think as locomotion causes all sorts of problems I think. So telekinesis of spirit/empathy into the animal avoids that. What would be acceptable is Were-form into an actual wolf. Again the caveat there being that the Druid must be knaked or wear the skin of the animal to turn into about human size or so only too then that causes the Druid to run fast but have no equip if they want to switch again?
I'd say all these methods might be useful observance methods and spying scouting in person would be more dangerous but potentially more powerful ways to observe spy (aside from meta spying).
Tracking it would be good to get some info from the devs how eg rangers track mobs/beasts/monsters and bounty-hunters their target...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well Scrying sounds quite powerful. I'm not sure if scrying would be hackable however?
If there is code to see what another player sees for a certain duration and allow for a detection check, the code might be hacked to skip the detection and never reach an end allowing for permanent, out of character spying?
It seems more advanced to have the server execute instructions for your client that it wasn't expecting to exist but I'm not a coder. Is that how cheaters cheat?