<Kabal> Dan Repperger's page

Mine was a comment about setting expectations for the game.

Since there's only one per person, I'll go with my LOTRO one. I think Outtera looks better, but it's arguably a still render. It's from a tech demo for an engine, but I haven't personally seen the demo in action.

Let's see...

Outtera

LOTRO

Tera (1) Tera (2)

You'll have the ability to change all the visual aspects of your character. We'll have some system with various paid & free options to change other things like names and races. So you'll be able to re-customize your character's visuals at some point in the future.

Woo hoo! I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. It was either a feature like this or all of my characters were going to become half-elves.

Ryan, dude, you're missing an opportunity here. If you have a bunch of cool art assets like that, let us have a contest to have them moved to our settlements.

Agree with Tyveil on buy orders. As someone that gathers but doesn't craft, it'd be nice to have buy orders waiting. It's almost like an NPC quest, except a player is asking me to find 20 coal!

But more than anything, I'd love to have a guild bank. Hoarding material until I can catch someone that needs it is rather burdensome.

Thanks for the info! That makes sense. Though I think it'd be a little more obvious if the feats reflected that. For example...

Whatever (1)
Keyword1

Whatever (2)
Keyword1, Keyword2

Whatever (3)
Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3

The ranks all showing all keywords (even when they don't actually have them) is rather confusing.

I'm looking at a trainer right now, and according to the tooltips, there's absolutely no difference between the level 2 and level 3 versions of my attack spells (cleric). What am I missing? I assume there has to be some reason to train them up.

Yup. "We're not starting the game already at war," doesn't sound like a problem to me. We'll develop economically, and as the economy gains features, attacking us will look more worthwhile than it does now. At that point, we'll have to protect whatever we've gained.

Until then, I don't expect to see much PVP beyond repulsing the occasional "let's roll on them for the lulz", which is fine.

If I really want PVP, I'm sure there are settlements to the south that would take a volunteer soldier.

While we're waiting on helmets, can we have grocery bags added to the game? I just need something to put over my character's head until we get helmets and/or a chance to reset our appearance. That lack of rotation killed me.

In all seriousness, is there a chat channel for companies or settlements? I'm not setting one, so I'm guessing either it's not there or it's turned off. Since MMOs live and die on the social investment of its players, I hope this is a feature pretty high on the to-do list.

Hard is fun!

That's what she said.

✓ Childish
✓ Necessary

They will also have access to better grass.

So in all of those MMOs, you have never found one that you quickly lost interest in or never had the compulsion to log in again, after the first few hours?

That's a fair point. I have played some I lost interest in rather quickly or read up and decided not to play at all. I guess what I should say is that the general culture within the community isn't unique, even if not totally ubiquitous.

Yes, there are unique things about PFO. It's being done by a small team with a relatively minimalist goal. That introduces all kinds of new ways for things to go wrong.

My point was just that I see nothing unique occurring in the evolution of the community. As for pre-release account selling, I've seen plenty. The major difference is that most places will block and ban for trying to sell in-game goods on the website, so the accounts are being sold on Ebay instead of the MMO's own forum.

*crosses fingers and thinks maby it's for the GRASS!

They say the key to internet humor is repetition. I have to admit that Pyronous is actually becoming pretty funny, and I mean that in a good way. His charm offensive vis-a-vis ubiquitous grass posts is winning me over to his camp.

This one's for you.

After playing more MMOs than I care to count, I've noticed they all go through an identical set of stages around launch.

1. First, the idea is vague and only on paper, so everyone's brains fills in the blanks with wonder and joy. "This is going to be the best game ever!"

2. Once things get clarification, those blanks get replaced with actual data, and people start to see things they don't like. "This game has serious flaws."

3. People fixate on the flaws to the point they convince each other the game sucks. "We're all getting ripped off. Call the FTC. This is the biggest bunch of morons in gaming history."

4. It releases, and despite being imperfect, it's still a good game. "I'm having too much fun playing to complain on the forums all day."

There's nothing about this game's progress that seems novel to me.

I think there's a lot of good feedback in this thread, and I largely agree with Xeen's original post. While I don't care to wade into a debate over the minutiae, there's one recurring theme I'd like to comment on.

As a fan of history, I'm reminded of the aircraft carrier, Enterprise, in WW2. After it had taken heavy damage during an engagement, they made an unusual choice. While critical repairs were done at dock, much of the carrier's patching and refit was done while it was under way and even in the middle of combat. It's my understanding this event coined the phrase, "Built at sea."

Most games are released as finished, polished products (well, except for Creative Assembly games). You drop your $50 - $60 (plus subscription if it's an MMO) and there's your game. If you like it, great. If you hate it, tough. It's already built, and changing it will be really hard. And in the MMO space, you can bet companies are going to build very safe and same-y games since they're risking a lot before they see a dime in ROI.

But going all the way back to the Kickstarter, GW has made it clear this game is being built at sea.

Unlike a lot of traditional game designs that are delivered nearly feature-complete and where feedback from players is limited to bug hunting and mechanical balancing, Pathfinder Online will have a much more community-driven development process. Many game features will be developed and implemented based on prioritization choices made by the community and they will be added to the game through a process of continuous iteration during Beta - the Crowdforgers who are Early Enrollees will be involved not only in playing the game but in shaping its very nature.

The initial product will be very stripped down with a lot of placeholders, missing features, and rough bits. The advantage to GW is that they don't need a $100,000,000+ investment to make the game. The advantage to us is that we get to shape the product through crowdforging instead of having to swallow decisions they made two years before the first E3 trailer.

Some people don't like this model. It feels like paying them to make a game you already bought, and in the meantime, you get missing features and sketchy graphics. I get that. I really do. I completely understand someone saying they want nothing to do with a project being run this way.

What I don't understand is the people that have been here from the start that seem surprised by this truth. The quote above was from their Kickstarter FAQ, right alongside delivery dates that strongly suggest they don't expect the game to be in a release version 1.0 state until early 2016.

A big thanks to all of you that showed up and participated! For anyone that missed the event, there was some great information on both where the game is at, what's being released over the next few weeks, and some of the ideas they have for the more distant future. Though Ryan didn't commit to doing it, I found their plan for temples really exciting.

If you missed it and want to hear everything that was discussed, you can find it here.

If nothing else, I hope there's a long disconnect time unless you're in a building meant for socialization and rest (like a tavern or smallhold). I guess you don't want it to be too long in case someone got disconnect for honest reasons (e.g. power outage) but long enough that people can't pop in and out of the game with impunity.

My brain just explodes when I think of plunking down $5,000 real dollars for such a thing. I would take myself on a dream vacation to some real place and take lots of photos if I had that much money lying around.

I am sure, though, that folk will appreciate that some are able and willing to buy taverns. If I ever...

I completely get that. And I'd be lying to say I can spend that amount of money on anything in life (particularly a video game) without some degree of buyer's remorse. ;) I think what enabled that purchase was two things. On the practical level, while I'm hardly rich, my wife and I make enough money to buy silly things once in a very great while. On the sentimental level, as I said above, I really like immersion and ownership in games. The "soft value" of having an unassailable piece of the game that I decorated, named, and solely own is worth a lot to me.

And I intend to do what I can to share that with the community as a whole. While I'm a member of Kabal, I have an agreement with the leadership that the tavern will always be neutral. Everyone from every faction is welcome, and I'm working on plans to keep a wide variety of activities going on there for the community to participate in. Scavenger hunts, competitions, IC-performances by bard characters, etc.

Who has $200 (or $5,000 for that matter) in spare cash just lying around for a digital only thing that someone can (and will, easily) destroy when the player(s) are at work, school, asleep, or doing an infinite number of things out out of game?

I've made no secret of the fact that I backed at the tavern level, and obviously you guys know what that backing level cost. Immersion is a HUGE factor for me in determining how much I enjoy a game. Solely owning a piece of an MMO without the drama of leading a faction was right up my alley.

But to your point, the tavern gets free upkeep for six months, and after that, as long as I keep making my upkeep, it can't be destroyed. If the building was open to siege, I wouldn't have dropped $50 on it, much less $5,000.

I know there are several features that have been confirmed (or at least strongly implied) that a tavern will have over a hold...

1. class trainers

2. possibly a cut of service transactions for the owner

3. a wide-open door that enables a public gathering place for RP or social interaction (though obviously that has to be fostered by the owner)

4. NPC guards to keep me and my guests safe (no idea how they'll be factioned)

And it's been communicated to me that they want to do a lot more to leverage taverns as valuable POIs in the future and plans exist to that end. What exactly does that mean, will they follow through, and (if so) when will it happen? I have no idea. But I've got enough trust in the team to take that gamble. However, I fully understand why others wouldn't.

I intend to RP the character I use at the tavern keeper. The one I send out adventuring will probably be much more game-oriented.

Obviously this thread has wandered all over the place, and I'm not interested in wading into some long-running feuds. The only value proposition I was shooting for is a pretty pragmatic one.

1. PFO is a video game being run by a company that must make a certain amount of money to keep the game around.

2. That money comes from people that care enough about the game to pay to play it.

3. While no one has any statistics, we all know there's at least a measurable percentage of people that are turning away from the game because, while they knew there would be PVP, they expected a little more room for RP and PVE.

4. If enough players turn away, the money dwindles. Should that happen, GW has to lay off staff, slow development, or possibly shut the game down.

5. Ergo, if you want this game to survive so you can do the craziest, wild west violence, territorial wars, or whatever -- and do it with an ever-improving feature set -- it may behoove you (regardless of IC alignment or OOC play preferences) to agree upon one place in the world that all factions don't tear apart so PVE/RP players will join the game and thus keep it financially solvent.

Maybe it's not necessary. Maybe there are enough PVPers to carry the game. Maybe a settlement will get strong enough to be genuinely stable. Who knows. I'm just saying it's worth thinking about.

And, yes, it requires treating one settlement as special. Even if the occasional jerk goes in there to be disruptive, the general populace would be agreeing to leave it alone. But that settlement is also bringing a very unique, meta-game resource we all benefit from: a revenue stream that lets PFO survive and grow.

To be clear: I'm not bashing PFO or the direction it's headed. I backed at a high level, and I've enjoyed a great relationship with some of the people on this project going back a year or two before the Pathfinder TTRPG was even created. I'm just saying I get where people are coming from when they worry the sandbox is likely to be an inescapably violent and ephemeral place, and they wish it wasn't so. They want to build and expand, not build and rebuild.

Ryan, what's the target date for implementing the first iteration of taverns and other backer-reward structures (can't remember if there are any others, now that I think about it...)? Will they go in at the same time as, before, or after the premium items?

Not to derail, but all of this talk of Destiny's Twin and such reminded me that I don't remember exactly what add-ons I purchased. I hope they get the account manager on Goblinworks.com working soon since I can't check that stuff on Paizo anymore!

After this thread and several PM conversations, I think that's exactly the route I'm going to take. I don't know what game circumstances (e.g. conflict) or tavern features will allow me to do, but I can at least give the place a decent name, interact with anyone that visits, and try to create social activities in and around the place for people to engage in. I really want to give people a reason to be there other than grabbing some supplies and logging off for a "rested" buff.

Heck, if anyone is RPing a bard -- and the inn provides me with income -- I'd love to even hire IC entertainment to visit.