Being's page

We could best tell if a real solution was discovered by playing it.

It is possible that the opportunity is now. If there is nobody there but us we could play as we prefer.

What would be missing, were we to try it, is the means of story-telling.

Now,storytellers have been gathering ears for millennia with nothing but a campfire. But what we are seeking is rather different. A story lived, virtually, varies from a story told.

The nut of a story is a conflict. We have a setting. We need characters. We need a conflict and a way to resolve it.

I don't think beating down a hex filled with whatevers quite fits that bill.

Is this the trail we seek, or a dagger I see before me?

(Ostentatious Shakespearean allusion provided gratis)

We lost the Pathfinders with the PvP focus. Should have identified that as a clue. Making it possible to PvP was, I think, a right move. Making the game all PvP was a mistake, no matter how cost effective it looks on paper for paying players to be the content.

...

Kor - Orc Scrollkeeper wrote:

While I enjoy the "sense of risk vs reward" that the pvp aspect brings in, bottom-line there are not enough pvp'rs out there to make this type of game a profitable venture, if the primary focus is pvp.

The whole EoX was pro-pvp and they added a spice to the game, and as much as I dislike it even Zycor added a spice to the day to day of the game while he was more active.

I believe it went south when PvP essentially became the game and adventuring together receded to something that would be nice to have somewhere out beyond the horizon.

War between economic cooperatives is interesting more at a strategic level, and to me a strategic game doesn't fulfill the promise of pathfinder.

I believe that for this game to work there must be opportunities for adventuring at the party level. Clearing an area of Pinatas is not an adventure.

Unless the player is actively guiding the community, the strategic game is like backstory.

The tools for settlement warfare aren't ready for us yet. Chill a bit. You'll get your PvP.

Perhaps a better solution would be a dynamic GW site page similar to what we used to see on Camelot Herald showing the map displaying (among other things like political hex ownership) a colorful little icon registering PVP kill count. Accessible to everyone, non-judgmental, impersonal, and objective.

I'm a bit disappointed Andius left, if only because I was looking forward to getting my ass kicked by him.

The more likely case seems to me that Andius holds at least one more account than he has sold.

No magic wand is needed to give value to in-game coin.

Coins already have value we just don't have a scale by which to measure value. I think identifying what that scale should be was the objective of this thread. The relationship between the value of a coin and what it can buy hasn't been established but it will evolve, and it hasn't much to do with the agency of the developer except insofar as resource availability, drop rates, and possible rates of manufacture dictate. There is a difference between what is called economics in the real world and what will be the economics in the game world.

That coin has value is actual, whatever it turns out to be, because it is something that exists in the game. It will likely be tied to the value of xp training time once that becomes auctionable.

There are significant differences between artificial economics and real economics.

We will likely end up dying armors and/or using banners to identify, but that won't help all that much until players use a little common sense and curb their tendency to run and hop wildly across the field.

The complaint is that you cannot tell who is on your side and who is an enemy. Healers cannot find their people all the way across the battlefield that need healing. Well it isn't for the developers to force you back into formation. The serious advantage of a formation is that if someone is where they are supposed to be you don't have to check their name to see who they are you KNOW who they are and where they are. If they aren't where they are supposed to be it is on them (but your reputation and military success will remind you to encourage them to stay in formation).

PFO is going to have formation combat. We've been wondering what that is going to look like. Well look around you. This is what it looks like. If you cast an aoe you cast it onto the other side. Don't cast it on this side. So each group is a formation. You know where your groupmates are because you are in formation. You don't have to check because they are where they are supposed to be. You don't have to check because the people on your side are either behind you or adjacent to you. They are the group to your right and your left. It is the guys across from you who are the enemy. See how that works?

So organize yourself with a smidgen of intelligence rather than whining for color-coded friends.

Maybe it is better to identify your target before pulling the trigger. All this trash talk about milk and cookies but you want things color coded.

Being wrote:

It worked <happy dance!>

Essentially I clicked <set training>
Selected DT Character
Toggled from not training to training xp
Clicked set training again (step #10)
Logged DT char in
XP backdated correctly (given I didn't log in at all until just the other day).

Well done, good news.

Ok so to clarify ... your main backdated XP all the way back to the start of EE and the DT also backdated XP but only to the time you first logged in to the account ?

That is what it looks like... but I haven't done the math. So let me think... Character 1 began with 6000 xp. Character 2, created the same night, began with 1000 xp. I trained character 2 to where he had between 250-300 xp unspent, ran him down to Phaeros, then let him lie fallow until I might figure out what I did wrongly. When this evening, with the help of the community (thank you Ravenlute your response was the key) I succeeded in establishing him as the twin he suddenly had in excess of 17000 xp. I think that may calculate out to equal what I have put into character 1.

That is close enough for the Navy.

It worked <happy dance!>

Essentially I clicked <set training>
Selected DT Character
Toggled from not training to training xp
Clicked set training again (step #10)
Logged DT char in
XP backdated correctly (given I didn't log in at all until just the other day).

I set training for my one character, entered game and logged out. I then created and set training for my second character, entered the game and logged out. I re-entered the game and only my first character had training set. So I attempted to set his training again.

So I am given to understand that I have eliminated my DT?

Allow me to express a bit of dismay. Politely. Quietly.

Might be a good idea to simply give out the most basic armor, perhaps at lowered durability, just like wands, shortbows, and the like. I foresee naked huddled masses shivering in the moonlight otherwise.

Well, I think most of the graphics are fine for now, however I was standing next to an Elf yesterday and he scared the bajeezus out of me. He totally looked like an ugly Roswell alien, with weird, glazed-over eyes.

Now you realize why I write science fiction. It isn't fiction.

Mac? Big Mac? Is there to be a hamburger client?

Why not change Cleric to Priest?

Clerical error, obviously.

DA-Inquisition currently.

I think one of the best advertisements would swoop in over the land down into an active settlement from the clouds. But it would also market the fact that it is a game in development, that grows even while being played, and that the players have had and will have a hand in its creation. Let the advertisement be true, unabashed, and proud of its accomplishments but aware and vocal about how far it is from finished. Let it be seen as it is, but let it's promise shine through like the star of a rough, partly polished sapphire.

The fact remains this game goes live in a few weeks. No matter what Dancey says about being alpha if there are to be no more wipes and a fee is charged the mmo population will regard this as a launched game.

Dancey had a target of 20000 players 6 months into EE, from what I have picked up on the forums I am not convinced the game can handle 20000 even if you assume a 10% value logged on at any one time.

Capacity is expensive. A revenue stream is necessary to enable that capacity.

PfO had a lot of promise, if they made good on those promises, however much of the mmo audience has already seen the promises made by other companies fail to come to fruition. They are now sceptics and if they come and find the game not fulfilling those promises they will leave and won't be back.

PFO has a lot of promise. Those who desire a ten year old game should wait ten years. If they do not, they aren't really the players we needed. Maybe they will mature in ten years.

Is PfO dead? No it isn't but it is on life support. People have stopped talking about it which is an ominous sign.

The worst thing they can do now in my opinion is advertise because this trailer will set expectations which will soon be found to be untrue merely by looking at youtube.

If the trailer is true, then it will not be a lie. If the trailer is a lie, then you might have at last one point in your post.

Get the game right with a soft launch of EE then when you have a game you don't think will make most of the community go wtf is this, then advertise.

No, advertise what it is that is being offered. Not a complete, finished game, but a game in development. Let it be clear what is being advertised, because the process of art, of creation, has value in itself to those who value art and creativity.

I am of the impression that increasing server capacity is more a matter of finances than technology.

That is one reason why we reeeaaally don't want accountants managing engineering.

The OP should not expect neutrals and chaotics to be lawful.

I don't think anything but a small shop can approach such a mission realistically and they would have to generate a revenue stream while they did it. Sorta like what we see GW doing here, despite all the dramatics of doom in certain quarters. A big team would be too expensive to permit iterative development of all the systems that would be needed. A small, capable outfit might be able to get by on a realistic revenue stream to build the whole game over many years. Sorta like what GW is doing.

Oh, did I already point that out?

United Service Organization.

If I may I'd like to add to my impression and provide my thoughts for the community's evaluation and conversation. This is from a conversation Jazz began with me and I'd like to read the community's take on my thinking if you have any thoughts.

As usual I will be found long-winded.

I understand the concept of party-based adventure like is present in tabletop. I understand how desirable party-based adventure should be. Groups are a legacy from the storytelling tradition of one storyteller and many listener-participants. Storytelling is important to me, but so far there is no storytelling to PFO. There is an environment that compels group play and discourages individualism. The idea that it will be the players who make the story is commendable, but there also isn't a shared plotline for the players' story to grow around.

I don't quite follow on this eagerness to finally do everything with a group, and to never play independently from a group.

What we have in PFO is a mono-dimensional competitive environment, not a story. Arguably the settlements will eventually forge their stories in terms of one another, but there is no history present to uncover, interact with, or build upon. There aren't mysteries to unearth. There is no game to the individual game. There is only, merely, potential for competition. There isn't any inherent content to fight for, there is only player-generated content to fight against. The why of it all is lacking.

Meaningfulness is missing. Meaningfulness is born of the interaction of the individual with history and with culture. It is insufficient to pretend that meaning comes only from community. Communities are made of individuals, and there is no game for the individual in this design.

The substance of a group comes from the individual members in it. What is lacking is in-game substance for the individual identity. I think the players will end up needing a way to establish individual identities. We have time-based progression and we have group-oriented content. The game assumes the content of the individuals who comprise those groups with be native to the player playing each character in those groups. Yet there is more to the individual that gives meaning than membership, there is what a character does. The character can craft a backstory and that is all well and good, but it is insubstantial.

To what will my character aspire? Is it merely to be a cog in someone else' machine? Should the only game in PFO be the property of the 1%, the community leaders? The group leaders? The generals? If I wish to go a-wandering out in the wild I cannot wander myself, but only follow someone else? Will the would-be leaders be followed? On what authority will they lead, or does environmental compulsion take the place of merit and respect? Will players choose to cooperate, or will they be enslaved to the group by the lash and shackles of necessity?

I would choose to work cooperatively, not be compelled to coordinate out of necessity.

Depending on how the design intends to incorporate the Factions, faction play might prove crucial to solve for my objection and should have been part of the MVP. That, and tuning some of the PvE content for the individual, some for the 2-man, and leave core escalations for groups. Then let the escalations be farther apart. The River Kingdoms as it stands have a serious overpopulation problem among PVE escalations that escalate far too quickly. There is no room to play, there is only room to engage in repetitive routine.

Non-military Humvees are ostentatious.

It is premature to deliver judgment, as the project is incomplete. The artist hasn't signed his painting. The book has not been published. The game is still being built.

The design is complete enough to evaluate, allowing that I am not privy to its entirety.

Design Impressions:

• There is overemphasis on cooperative-competitive play and too little emphasis on individual play.
  
• PvE is monodimensional. The potential of emerald spire and player-made dungeons offers respite to this condition, but even there the restriction on material rewards seems to emasculate the potential.
  
• Not counting character development, there is very little appeal in the game for the builder unless he or she is a community leader.
  
• There is little for the explorer to do except map resource nodes and map advantageous/dangerous battlegrounds.
  
• Escalations ramp up and spread much too quickly.
  
• Efforts to reduce and eliminate escalations should be more effective, and that effort should pay off over time so that a settlement has some time to do other things than 'mow the lawn' continuously... and there should be other things to do than mow the lawn lest we become ruminants perpetually chewing escalatory cud.
  
• The commonality and universality of achievements renders achievement mostly meaningless. If everyone does them where is the achievement?
  
• The political game, again, is one of those 1% deals, just like settlement building.
  
• Settlement designs, at least at the start, seem terribly shortsighted in terms of specialization. A community would not naturally specialize into such dependent relationships.
  
• The vast array of feats, conditions, consumables, etc. in combat are obstructive and should be more deeply placed rather than just spread out for the player to micromanage while in combat. Agreed, the complexity and variety helps offset the lack of 'builder' elements observed above, but these things should not get in the way of an active fight. Provide an interface the player can drill-down to manipulate while preparing for action rather than erecting abilities as obstructions to combat.
  

Interesting. Sort of an 'embrace codependency' approach.

I miss the reasonable man you were. Or seemed, whatever the case may be.

You fail to give due credit to the design, Andius. Not everything is present in the current iteration. There is more to come.

Failure to see does not mean the world is dark. Try opening your eyes before cursing the darkness.

Being wrote:

Bluddwolf wrote:

2. Role Balancing: I can honestly not think of anything a Rogue can do that Fighters, In particular, can not do better.

If your settlement goes wizard/rogue, a rogue can more fully and conveniently train than a fighter since the included skirmisher trainer doesn't train your basic fighter skills.

.......................................................................

Are you seriously using the argument that a class is easier to train if you don't have the other kind of class trainer as a justification that it's balanced?

Wow.... just wow....

Let's rephrase the question to: Other than the mistaken assumption Goblinworks have any clue of how to balance a class why would any settlement not already locked into rogue training facilities ever take them???

No, as usual, you completely missed the meaning in favor of dissing somebody you dislike.

I was grumbling because the skirmisher trainer doesn't train basic fighter feats. Since my settlement went the wizard/rogue route my options are more limited than I would prefer.

Truly, were you to suddenly surprise everyone by refraining from bashing everything that isn't you your question is just the last half of your rhetorical 'question': Why would any settlement ever offer rogue training rather than something else? The obvious answer is because they wish to focus on wizardry.

It won't drown, it just isn't going to shoot up in a heartbeat like a skyrocket on Independence day. Or Bastille day for that matter. And Ryan appears to have the project well in hand to me.

Only a god would expect Athena to spring full grown from the head of Zeus.

We all knew, or should have known. that the open and transparent development style GW was taking would show us the beginnings rather than only the end product. We all knew or should have known it would take time for the game to develop into its planned evolution. And like the lovers of sausages being shown how sausages are actually made, some of us should have expected to be a little put off by it. Work isn't pretty. It should have been no surprise.

I hope the team manages eventually to shame all the nay-sayers with a brilliant work of art at the end, but I recognize that brilliant works of art are exceedingly rare.

Mostly I am interested in what is, to me, the most significant design experiment in current game development: Regulation of viable PvP. Will it work? How might it affect the history of game development? The problem it attempts to address has been a monumental impediment to the genre.

This one piece is worth more than the donation I made and I look forward to seeing the experiment in action. Polished grass, for one example, is chickenfeed.

There are those... actually this link says it all.

It would be an error to schedule the attention of the development staff based on what prospective players believe they want. In the first place everyone has a different idea of what they want and considers themselves important. Second the elements of the system are interdependent. No one part can advance without all its related dependencies advancing as well.

Polished grass is fairly far down my personal list of priorities anyway: I'm not at all sure how it came to dominate yours unless it was merely a tool to try and heap up a molehill into a mountain.

Though to be honest I don't think I like this community much anyways.

Honesty is generally a plus, but to dislike others because they disagree will limit your intellectual growth.

In an echo chamber of agreement there is no reason to question assumptions.

I have heard that it is a burden of the brightest to forever distrust their own conclusions. There are so few able to refute their hypotheses that the likelihood of error grows unsustainably great.

Embrace your peers.

So THAT is what Inca Gold is...

I know I am much less invested in my character knowing he will be wiped, but nevertheless pleasant surprises abound. Like fashionable light armor showing up when I just crafted rogue leathers. It must have gone rogue!

Most likely Xeen felt it was a victory because he respects you, Decius. If he felt it was unworthy of recounting then that would have been a slight, wouldn't it have been?

If you have a stuffy nose and try to say 'Avatar' it comes out... Abadar.

I think it is great that we discover answers directly from the developer. Whether or not it is what one wished to hear, it is infinitely better than dead silence.

As a serious altaholic I would love an account wide whisper.

In other games I have a friends list and I usually can just right click the name on the list and choose 'Send Tell' and it auto fills and I can just worry about typing my message.

I'm trying to remember how STO did it, the account name and the character name were linked somehow and I remember really liking how it worked. I think you could even have 2 people with the same name.

I think I recall a dot. as in /whisper being.beingsguy

I wonder whether the extensibility of an auction house is linked to the development index of the settlement?

I don't think it is merited to equate design intents with 'promises'. If someone intends to build a system that will do an idealistic laundry list of things, markets the idea believing their list is achievable, and gets most of it right that doesn't mean the entries in the list that have not been met are broken promises, especially while they're still working on it.

Describing these design objectives as broken promises doesn't seem right to me.

The point I was gesturing toward is that the design goal of making it so the maximal character having to think twice before bullying a crowd of much lower level characters will be met in the design, and I hold the position that this is a plus for the design, and not a delta.

Well you could always combine the two issues and have achievements grant ability increases but people would find reason to be unhappy with that as well.

It is pretty simple really, the sort of player who wants to be able to just login, create a character, ramp it up to max level using some min/max formula build and then go out and harass other players for tears generally is also the sort of person who is very loud and aggressive on the forums.

So anything that limits the ability to login, max your character and go kill people will meet with loud complaints :D

That does not necessarily mean (without some way of testing the player base and crowd forging is way too biased in favor of the loud and obnoxious) that a majority of players have an issue, it may just mean the aggressive pushy loud part of the player base have an issue.

...or they have big mouths and think everyone will be interested in their take on things... present company excepted of course!!

I was always partial to Ankylosaurus, personally.

Each of them was followed around by a club. On the end of it's tail.

Perhaps the wife might be interested in joining us? If so there are more than one alpha slot available, and the alpha backers and 'hidden backers' apparently have taken care of the money element, at least until early enrollment...

Well, I'm no spring chicken by any regard - I just happen to like the features that give some degree of power to the community to self-police as it were.

Sorry, lynch mobs aren't justice and popularity is fickle. I speak when I feel I have something to say. If you want your voice heard you have to speak up, Doc.

Being wrote:

Takasi wrote:

Being wrote:

Ours is the subjective position but we are not positioned to make business decision for them, or had you noticed that minor detail?

You are asking me a straw man question. In my statement I did not notice or distinguish between 'our' subjective opinion or 'theirs', so I do not know what detail, minor or major, that you refer to.

No, I don't deal in straw man tactics. The detail is that we do not have design authority over the development of the game. We are asked out opinion when the developers find something that could go more than one way and wish our input.

I did not distinguish in my statement who has what opinion. Stating that I did not notice a detail related to a statement I did not make is by definition a straw man tactic.

I didn't say you had asserted 'Our'. I said 'Our' as opposed to 'their', meaning the designer/developer.

Mine wasn't a straw man argument. A straw man argument is a rhetorical device whereby you describe the person you mean to discredit as holding a position you can prove to be wrong. Then you show how that 'straw man' you set up is wrong, and your audience will be inclined to disbelieve the guy you discredited. I did no such thing. I identified that what we are supposed to do is different from what the developer is supposed to do. Our role as opposed to their role.

Your assertion that I was making a straw man argument would itself have been a straw man had you read carefully.

Being wrote:

Do you like it and is it ready are radically different from rewriting the Constitution. Pre-screening isn't people walking about shouting on-stage while the cameras are rolling.

Who is doing that?

Someone urging the abandonment of a core design element like achievements from a game that regulates the realization of advancement potential over time with a second metric that appears to intend a requirement that someone also has to actually play the game, like achievements. The argument was that achievements should be removed, when achievements are integral to the game design. That is like rewriting the game's constitution to be more favorable to someone who wants to accumulate xp and a year later pop up on the radar out of nowhere with the power of someone who has been playing the whole time. Xeen's idea to replace that regulating mechanism with gold would be fine, unless I'm missing something, if there were no way to transfer gold to that dormant character.

Assuming there was no agreement as a part of screening to preclude it, what's wrong with a viewer saying 'this sucks and here's how I would change it'?

By the same token what is wrong with my disagreeing with their opinion and being vocal about it?

If the producers, directors, crew or actors listen and make their own decisions accordingly then why would it bother you?

It won't. But if you say something I disagree with, recommending a change I think will harm the game, what is wrong with my giving voice to my disagreement?

Yeah we need to get Chris Roberts and Michael Dell onboard (Austin, Dallas, hey its Texas you're pushing, troop...)