Alexander_Damocles's page

I'm not really seeing how Resonance actually improves the game. It feels like a solution in want of a problem. Before, you were limited to what fit on your character, now it is a limit based on how magic your personality is. Either way, its a limit, and Resonance is far more fiddly book keeping than "one belt slot item per character".

If you want to make magic items more interesting, then do that! Use the Starfinder method of limited +STAT items, and run with it.

Resonance is the first time I feel like 2E is taking a step backwards.

Andius, you really hold no relevance here.

Thod says his settlement is growing, even counting in the players who have left.

Your response is effectively "nuh uh!"

Seeing as Thod actually runs a settlement, I'm inclined to believe him.

Didn't you have other games to go be in charge of? I'm sure they're missing you dearly...

How closely bound are the AGC and EOX? Should treaties signed regarding EOX be assumed to extend to AGC? Should agreements with AGC be understood to also apply to EOX? Are you a member company, a settlement company?

Bluddwolf wrote:

The loss of towers will eventually hinder even non combatant ability to train, and so it harms them as well.

The Seventh Veil's is don't kill random players. If we don't know you're an enemy, we leave you alone. Everyone who is harmed by the loss of Towers in this war is a known enemy.

I'll take "Missing The Point" for 500, Alex.

Taking towers affects non combatants in Golgotha.
All people affected by taking towers is a known enemy.
Thus, non combatants are considered known enemies by TSV.
It can therefore be inferred that TSV non combatants are acceptable targets per TSV's own doctrines.

DeciusBrutus wrote:

Bluddwolf wrote:

Remind me how taking a tower does not harm non-combatants?

That is being compared to placing a small holding, to harvest a Monster Hex, which is not only PVE but it is harvesting a completely renewable resource.

Lol. Four GCEs in two sentences.

GCEs?

Generally Correct Explanations.

Forencith of Phaeros, TSV wrote:

While no one owns the nodes, you support stewardship of the land. Charging for licenses is your implementation of Kaitiakitanga, a way to create some limits, while providing a means to help support the stewards.

<happy dance>

I've learned a new word! And it's a good word, for an important concept, too.

<squirrels it away for future use>

(Yes, I'm weird, I know.)

Not at all, I promptly did the same thing!

My thoughts and prayers are with your family. Those situations are hard on everyone, and I hope you all find peace and rest periodically.

I have no doubt that if a truly Evil group who came to PFO to drive others out, you would see quite the community alliance forming together to stomp that behavior out.

EBA and Golgotha might fight, but we're like siblings. We do that. But someone outside the family starts something, well...

Kryzbyn wrote:

What exactly was the tragedy here?

From what I've been reading the game, as it's intended to be experienced, happened.

No.

The game as some of the PvP fraternity intend it to be experienced happened.

In EVE the philosophy is learn to PvP or go play another game. People go out of their way to harass PvE people in EVE with the idea they need to either get into PvP or just quit.

Pathfinder is not actually meant to be that way longterm.

Actually, yes. A group that wanted to play alone and not deal with other settlements (trade, alliances, tribute, banditry, etc), found that the game didn't work for them. Ryan and the devs have made it clear time and time again that very small groups are not viable for PFO, and you need to work with others. If that doesn't work for you, then the core gameplay mechanic doesn't work.

It's very simple, actually.

If you set up a trade agreement, they will honor it to the letter.

If you pay tribute, they will leave you alone.

They follow their own code and will not break it.

Those are the actions of a lawful state. If you don't have an agreement with them, then there is no law preventing them from doing what they want, hence lawful Evil. "What's yours is mine, unless we have an agreement that says otherwise."

(Golgothans are free to correct my statement)

You can roleplay that. You just have to find an in character response to bandits plauging your land.

Will you fight, will you pay them off, or will you flee? The choice is yours. Consider it a plot hook, or the start of an adventure.

Regardless of if you think TEO would use information that we shouldn't have, you should also consider you are attacking the integrity of Goblinworks and Paizo when you make such statements. If you have a problem with TEO, so be it, but to attack the people who make the game repeatedly and without any semblance of proof is rather dissapointing.

Attack us if you wish, but leave the developers out of it.

I believe outposts will be different than towers for a simple reason: you couldn't bank towers. If I needed 8 towers to maintain my training and I held 10, I couldn't bank the spare two towers time for a day when I held 6. With outposts, they actively produce resources, and resources can be banked for a rainy day. I can easily see people raiding outposts to build up a buffer for unexpected circumstances or to more rapidly grow their own settlement.

I would miss him, as well as most of Golgotha. They are good for the health of the game, they just need a few more mechanics to make the game function in a way that is more fun for them. I hope they can wait until those mechanics are in, it would be a shame to lose them.

At 5:00 Pacific Standard Time, The Empyrean Order and The Seventh Veil successfully cleared a Tier Two Escalation for the first time in the history of the game! Many thanks to all of the people who turned out to take down the escalation in the last few days, it could not have been done without the effort of each of you. Special thanks to Fierywind who put in a lot of time coordinating the raids on the escalation, our crafters for supplying the many sets of gear, those who guarded the raid groups, and all the dedicated people who scouted the hex for events!

Here stands the valiant group that defeated the Ustalavian Champion!

We look forward to future events and clearing further hexes!

Flynn, an exploit involves taking advantage of something you should not have. If longbow exploit were adding 150 damage on opportunity, that's a bug because it states it should be adding less.

The casters respond to agro by hitting you with attack debuffs. This is their normal response. There is no way to know what else they could or should be doing. There is no magic trick to get them stuck or to bug them out. Regardless, we mentioned to both Goblinworks and Paizo staff that the casters felt too easy.

It feels like the problem isn't what was done, it was who did it.

The devs have not ruled this as an exploit. In fact, they have encoufaged people go join in.

I think I'll listen to them. You are free to do what you want to do, of course.

There are precisely two Ustalavian mobs with issues: Casters and Prelates. The rest function as intended. Now, the casters are red and the prelates are the lowest level of purple. They die in moments to a large group. When their AI is fixed, nothing will change.

If you feel that large groups are an exploit, then I'm afraid you're simply wrong.

I first read that as "when does my mouth run out?" and thought "Its KC, the answer is never!"

I shall not be outdone! 3 copper I say!

1 copper bid. Yeah, I'll be that guy.

If someone asks for a dollar per handful of sand, and then cuts their rate to a dime per handful of sand....I'm still going to just pick up my own handful of sand.

The war of the towers won't change until towers have value, and it isn't easier to go claim an undefended tower than to defend your own.

The War of Towers right now is like trying to sell a handful of sand at a beach. Why would people buy your sand when they can just pick up their own handful?

TEO and Golgotha had a merry time chasing each other around tonight, fighting for fun.

However.

Several things became *very* apparent. Energizing field is a must have for PvP, as otherwise people can get clear, heal, and come straight back in. That is not fun in the least.

Targeting. There were an *incessant* stream of obscenities about the lack of targeting and the fact that all we could do was try desperately to click something.

PvP could be a lot of fun, and I'd like to thank Golgotha for an instructive experience that was both fun and frustrating. I'd like to think that PvP will get far better soon, and I look forward to future skirmishes! Thanks again to Phyllain, Tink, and Flynn Something-Or-Other.

You don't even need to be elite to be tearing through Tier 2 escalations right now. Decent tactics and around 6-8 players can handle either the Ustalavian Escalation or the Ogre Escalation. I can't speak to the Mordant Spire escalation as I haven't had the pleasure of dealing with it yet.

In table top, it is incredibly easy to position people to be exactly behind one another, or to coordinate actions. Why? It isn't real time. If PFO were turn based, then "like tabletop" would work. But that crucial difference necessitates a different way to handle healing. PFO is already different from tabletop, so make the decision that makes the most sense for the game medium being used.

Pretty sure it takes over half an hour to walk from one edge of the map to the other. An hour and half sounds more like it.

I would have preferred an option other than Yes/No on if I'd play if EE launched as is. I'd play, but it wouldn't be much. Maybe an hour or two a week.

DeciusBrutus wrote:

Kadere wrote:

Bluddwolf wrote:

Ryan Dancey wrote:

@Bluddwolf - ok, that's a legit place to start. It certainly isn't obvious to the average player why "making a multiplayer game into an MMO isn't just adding more server capacity". I'll try to explain a bit........

Well, that was so much more informative / useful than ROFLMAO. However, what I had said still holds true.... Not so much a tech issue, at least not one that money can't resolve.

Thank you for your extensive response.

It is only a tech issue that money can resolve if you consider that money buys people, and people design solutions. You can't buy a solution, only dev time. And buying dev time does not guarantee a solution, not even close.

It's only "an issue that can be resolved with money" if you mean "money is a required part of the resolution of this issue".

What I mean is that with enough money the servers can be bought. You don't have to create a new technology to transition from multi player to MMO level servers.

What Ryan just said was the exact opposite of that. Multiplayer servers work up to a point, when you hit the MMO threshold, then they start to fail and they spend more time talking to each other than actually running the game.

If it was easy and just required a huge pile of money be tossed at it, there would be AAA games a plenty trying that. Instead, they're sticking with tried and true methods, like sharding. If you want a single shard MMO that's big, well, you need a new way of looking at things, a new paradigm of program development and network architecture. Trust me, its not just a problem of "buy 5 more servers".

The problem with pickpocketing is it doesn't give the person who is being pickpocketed anything to really do. It comes down to an opposed check, and then its over.

The problem with stealing from vaults is that *everyone* would try to do it, wearing nothing but their threaded clothes that boost pickpocketing. The rewards would be huge, the costs....not terribly high.

If you can come up with a system where the person who would be losing their equipment can be just as much a part of the system and requires about the same amount of time/input, then by all means, bring up the system. But the idea has been discussed to death, and we have yet to find a viable system for it.

I think half the board doesn't have outstanding coordination, and that's part of why PFO is so appealing: same big sandbox style game, but with a targeting system that's more user friendly for them.

Even for the young, that text is really hard to read. The colors might be visually appealing, but you sure can't read the information on it at all.

Folks, let's not hijack Andius's thread. He's done a lot for the community in the past, so let's have the courtesy to not take over his thread.

Ibuypower.com is a pretty nice store.

General advice:

Get a larger power supply than you think you need, so you can expand later.

An i5 processor is all you need for gaming now, i7 is a waste of precious money.

Go NVIDIA on your graphics card, probably a GTX 760.

Shoot for about 8 GB of ram.

Get doubled fans for your tower, that should help keep the system last longer.

Hard drives, look at the transfer rate as well as the size, it actually does matter. Consider a Solid State Drive for your operating system for really fast boot times.

I see pretty colors and a lot of numbers. Help me understand what I'm looking at? Otherwise, all I've got is "Tier 1 bad, Tier 3 good".

I have lag and desync issues about once or twice an hour, but that's a huge improvement over earlier versions. Pretty much the smoothest playing Alpha I've been in (granted, its the *only* Alpha I've been in...), but it plays better than a fair few Beta's I've been in.

Keep up the good work!

Someone needs to make Elmer Fudd. Just for the sake of completing the joke.

Amazing. Goblinworks employees already solved the problem! Why, they must be competent game designers or something!

So, you'll sign the treaty then? Which means you'd be the same as us. How shocking.

So then I presume that Aragon will not agree to this proposal? And if it does, then you would need to leave that settlement, as you've declared that you'll stand up for the weak.

Further, would you have TEO take the authority to negotiate for every settlement on the map? If other settlements have an issue with the proposal, then come and talk with the community and see what happens.

Your mistake was that TEO owned the map and that we could dictate to every other guild and player how they would be permitted to play. That is arrogance and madness, but I'll love to watch you try to defend every single tower on the map 24/7 and not be a part of Aragon.

I'd really rather a solid launch on the 29th, with companies etc. Minimum Viable Product doesn't mean Minimum Functioning Product. There are a few crucial features that really need to be in the game for it to hit the Viable threshold.

Wuts dis Timbits tingy, an' ware duz me git sum?

Any tavern run by the Free Highlanders. (Which I really want to start calling Canada for some strange reason...)

I balanced what I felt was doable in a short timeframe and what I really feel the game needs (and what I want). I want to see all those extra classes/races, but that takes a lot of time to code and add. I really really think we *need* the ability to set laws over territory we control, as that is a fairly unique feature of Pathfinder Online and a good selling point, and so that has to take priority.

Folks, try to take this to Private Messages. The world doesn't need your dirty laundry, and it just makes everyone involved look bad. Do your best to mend things, and if that doesn't happen, then go your separate ways and find a settlement that works more to your liking. I believe you could find several that could work nicely for you.

You should announce your alliance to coincide with Golgotha's next announcement the Evergloom Alliance.

I would actually be highly amused if that alliance cropped up...

Bonnie, Virgil and Vali are making a title sequence!

*SNIP* lot more powerful than the vast majority of other gatherers in the game. These are gatherers at the top of their game. Not only does this make them more dangerous *SNIP*

A pure gatherer will be no more dangerous to a PvP player than a brand new one. Mining skills do not also come with combat skills. They are not dangerous, and you should know that.

Lets spell out the risk vs reward point here.

Attacking a gatherer in any other hex: Risk= will lose rep unless using SAD. Reward= may gain low cost crafting mats.

Attacking a gatherer in a Starmetal hex: Risk= will lose rep unless using SAD. Reward= may gain most valuable crafting mats.

This already is a good reason for bandits etc to go and ply their trade in a starmetal hex. Reducing or removing the rep penalty does nothing to boost anything but the number of bandits thieving from others in a starmetal hex. It doesn't make the PvP more meaningful, doesn't increase human interaction, it just makes it cheaper for one group to do something that the devs have already said they don't want to have happen.

You want to have a starmetal hex all to yourself? Claim the territory around it and have your laws be "trespassers shot on sight". Sounds too costly? Pay in rep instead.

Oh I know you guys aren't bad people at all. If there has to be an Evil Empire, I'd rather it be Xelias, where it will at least be a principled Evil Empire, more Lex Luthor than Rovagug. Scheming, deadly, dangerous, absolutely wants your stuff, but polite about it. Its never personal, its always business.

*That* is what I'm looking forward to.

Don't want lashings? Join the Empyrean Order today!

*runs before Areks can lash him*