Akanaaz's page

I don't really want to see any sustained flight. Very short term things is cool, but I dislike sustained flight in MMO's. Cheapens the experience a lot.

@All - lots of points to make.

Player Loot: When you die, other characters may get part of your carried inventory. That's a hard & fast rule.

The elements of the design that are being worked on determine what of your inventory is vulnerable to being looted and how you can influence that vulnerability.

What This Means

1: You won't leave an area you consider extremely safe carrying valuable inventory. Because you'll spend a lot of time in areas that are not safe, you'll accumulate a lot of Gear that you can afford to lose. Having some of your stuff taken off your body is not the end of the world when that stuff represents a small fraction of your net worth.

2: Attacking other players has an upside in that the stuff you loot from them may be worth the effort. This will create a value in PvP and therefor people will engage in it.

3: The accumulation, loss, and replacement of Gear on a very regular basis drives the economic engine, which makes harvesting resources, processing and transporting crafting materials, and crafting items a worthwhile and interesting part of the game.

4: People will carry too much valuable stuff, get killed, loose it, and quit in anger. It's the nature of the beast. Sometimes they come back after a cooling off period, sometimes they leave forever. Pathfinder Online won't be a game everyone likes to play and we're OK with that.

Guard Contracts: Like Bounties, they'll work best when you offer them to known trustworthy individuals or groups. Offering an open contract to guard something is going to be pretty darn risky. Offering it to a Chartered Company with a great reputation for showing up and beating off interlopers, and not acting as spies for the interlopers will be the smart thing to do.

If you "cheat" on a Guard Contract and gank your employers, that will not be considered griefing. They should have done a better job vetting their employees. Your reputation will collapse quickly and your alignment will quickly shift to...

Thank you Ryan for the post. This is the one that convinced me to back the project fully now and start talking to my circle about it.

@Morg, I think he was being definitive, not rude. He was clearing the misconceptions.

Akanaaz wrote:

I am with Psyblade, I could see the outcome being pretty fun either way.

Fun for all except the merchant moving their goods. Here we come to the point that has come up several times "I'm not paying to be someone else's content"

For me personally, yeah, it adds something, a problem to overcome. Do you hire a company to escort you and attract attention? Or do you go it alone and try for the fast and secretive? Stay off the main roads and take a winding, less travelled road? Or take the main way and hope for the best?

Put bounties out on the brigands and try again? So that there's even more incentive to kill them?

Or try subterfuge and hire an escort for a not so valuable cargo while secretly transferring something valuable by other means?

It all has possibilities. But for other people, none of that holds any appeal at all, and I think it's important to recognise that not everyone enjoys the same scenarios.

It sounds like those people want a themepark style game. Sandbox is about choice, and the merchants would have plenty of choice. If they want to just auto transport some goods to another city, might as well play Train Simulator.

You can not and will not make every person or group happy with any game that is made. If you make a game, you identify your market and make the game for that market. Everything I have read here on this site doesn't make it sound like this game is being designed specifically for the themepark fans. The whole point of taking those goods and selling them somewhere else is to make a greater profit then selling them where you made them. Why are they worth more else where? Probably because they are harder to get there or there are more people who would use them there. Why are they harder to get? Because there must be some risk or some difficulty in getting them at that location. Otherwise, why are you moving goods? To satisfy some merchant desire to travel around? That is easily done in numerous other games.