Guurzak's page

Stacking Effects: How to connect the DOTs

What are these "stacks" I keep hearing about?

In most games, and for many effects in PFO, buffs and debuffs have a fixed effect and a fixed duration: A DOT that ticks for 30/sec for 10 seconds, or an expose that reduces your armor by 10% for 3 rounds, for example. Hitting the same target with one of these twice in a row typically won't do anything except resetting the duration back to its maximum.

But PFO also has stacking effects, which allow you to build up the effect through multiple applications to both prolong its duration and increase its effectiveness. So you could have multiple players all stacking the same Exhausted effect on their target, which would take away more and more of his stamina as well as lasting longer with each application.

OK, so what are these stacking effects specifically?

There are 9 stacking debuffs, in 3 broad groups.

DOTs

There are 3 Damage Over Time effects. They all do damage as a percentage of the targets MAX hitpoints, and also debuff one of the three defenses. The fact that these are percentage based is significant: as your target's hitpoint pool grows, DOTs become more and more valuable. (Assuming that you're able to land them successfully!)

Afflicted: Damage over time for (stack/10)% per round, and Reflex defense debuff for (stack).
Bleeding: Damage over time for (stack/10)% per round, and Fortitude defense debuff for (stack).
Burning: Damage over time for (stack/10)% per round, and Will defense debuff for (stack).

Effect at 100: Damage = 10% of target's max hit points this round, and -100 to relevant defense.

Attack debuffs

These 3 debuffs all reduce Base Attack, plus other effects. Drained and Frightened have identical effects and magnitude. Reducing someone's attack rating does not mean they will "miss" in the sense of not connecting at all, but they will do much less damage, will not be able to land critical hits, and the non-damage effects of their attacks will be significantly weakened or altogether negated.

Oblivious: Debuffs Base Attack and Perception for (stack)
Effect at 100: -100 BA, -100 PER

Drained: Debuffs Base Attack and Base Defense for (stack/2)
Frightened: Debuffs Base Attack and Base Defense for (stack/2)
Effect at 100: -50 BA, -50 BD

Other effects

The last 3 effects don't fit as neatly into a box.

Slowed: Reduces movement speed by (stack/2)%. Debuffs Reflex defense by (stack)
Effect at 100: -50% movement speed; -100 Reflex

Exhausted: Reduces max stamina and stamina regen rate by (stack/2)
Effect at 100: -50 Stamina; -50% stamina regen

Razed: Reduces physical resistance by (stack/4)
Effect at 100: -25 PR

Do all of these stacking effects, um, stack?

Yeah, so that's a language issue. In most games, "stacking" means that 2 different effects can both take full effect on the target, for example a poison DOT and a fire DOT. That'll just get confusing here, so let's talk about "collisions" rather than "stacking" when asking whether different effects can both function.

There is a mechanism for 2 effects to collide: they both have to be affecting the same characteristic, and they both have to be on the same channel. Channel is an arbitrary setting for each effect that doesn't do anything except determine collision potential. So, if we have 2 effects on the same channel that do different things, there's no collision. For example, Afflicted and Exhausted are both on the "Weakness" channel, but they do different things so there's no collision. And, if you have two effects that both affect the same attribute but are on different channels, you still have no collision. Slowed and Afflicted both debuff Reflex, but Slowed is on the "Torment" channel so there's no collision; you get the combined effect of both reflex debuffs.

There's only one combination among these 9 stacking effects where you actually get a collision on the same channel AND the same effect: Oblivious and Drained. They're both on the "Weakness" channel and they both debuff Base Attack, so only the larger one of those two attack debuffs is going to be in effect at a time. (The Perception debuff from Oblivious and the Base Defense debuff from Drained don't collide with anything, so those portions of the effects both work fine.) Other than that one combination, all other stacking effects "stack" with each other.

When I explained this for PFU, there was apparently some confusion regarding whether it mattered that attacks target the same or different defenses. For purposes of determining effect collision, it doesn't make any difference at all whether the attacks all go against Reflex or are split among all three of Reflex, Will, and Fortitude: collisions are determined based on the attributes they debuff, not the defense that the attack targets.

One last note on this: The 3 DOTs are all on different channels. If you were somehow able to land Afflicted 100, Bleeding 100, and Burning 100 on the same target at the same time, he'd take 30% of his max health pool in damage in the first round.

What about recovery? How do I get rid of stacks on me?

Everyone has a base recovery of 10 stacks per round for each stacked effect on them. So if you have Afflicted 10, Bleeding 10, and Burning 10 all on you at once, all three of those DOTs are going to be cleared away within 6 seconds. If you have Afflicted 30, it's going to drop to 20, then 10, then clear. This is a big reason why it's better to build up a strong single stack rather than have lots of little ones.

In addition to base recovery, all characters have access to training the Recovery Bonus feat. This adds 1 point to your recovery rate for every rank trained, so if you have Recovery Bonus 5, your standard recovery rate for all stacked debuffs is 15 per round.

And then, every armor feat line provides a recovery bonus to 3 chosen debuffs, and that bonus is equal to the number of matched keywords between your equipped armor and your slotted armor feat. So if you're a mid T2 player with 6 keywords matched, that'll give you +6 to your recovery for whichever 3 debuffs that armor feat benefits.

Fighter armors all provide recovery bonuses vs Afflicted, Bleeding, and Exhausted. Rogue armors all provide recovery bonuses for Afflicted, Bleeding, and Slowed. So, if you're going up against vets with physical roles, you may want to take their improved recovery versus physical DOTs into account when making your attack choices. Burning might be a better choice, if that option is available to you.

Wizard armors all have recovery bonuses for Burning, Exhausted, and Slowed. So, the converse of the physical roles; afflicted and bleeding will both work just fine here.

Clerics and the crafter roles don't have any particular pattern to their recovery bonuses. It's probably worth noticing that Crusader is the only heavy armor feat with a recovery bonus versus Slowed, but other than that it's just going to be a memorization exercise for each individual armor line if you want to go to that trouble.

So, that's how recovery is calculated: Base of 10, an additional generic bonus based on your Recovery Bonus feat rank, and then bonuses for recovering from specific effects based the number of keywords match on your slotted armor feat. Aside from passive recovery over time based on that math, the only way to actively clear stacks of debuffs is the Shrug Off effect. This design is still in flux, so just be aware that it exists and is relevant, until we get some clarity on the final design.

Recovery is important. A DOT stack of 100 will do a total of 55% of your total health over 10 rounds, at the base recovery rate of 10. If you get your recovery vs that DOT up to 25, that same DOT is only doing a total of 25% of your health pool, and it's completely cleared after 4 rounds. None of the role promotion feats require you to train recovery bonus, but it should not be overlooked.

How do I use stacks effectively? Which ones are the best?

Because stacking an effect increases both its effect and its duration, higher stacks are much more powerful than little ones. The best stacks to apply are the ones you can stack up the highest- so coordinate with the people you're adventuring with and choose effects that lots of you can help pile up. A single stack of anything at 50 is much, much more useful than 5 different stacks of 10.

With that said, do remember the cap of 100 on stack size: you don't want multiple copies of Blinding Dust (oblivious 100) going off on the same target at once.

What about positive stacks?

There are 2 stacking buffs that have the same basic mechanics as the stacking debuffs: Freedom, and Mind Blank. These buffs are granted by, and improve your defense against, control effects. So whenever someone roots, slows, stuns, or interrupts you, he also gives you stacks of freedom or mind blank, which will help you resist the next attempt to do the same thing. So what we should expect to see is the the first stun attempt on a target will land reliably; the second stun less so, the the third even less, and so on. If your whole group is using stun effects on the same target, he's very rapidly going to build up enough Freedom that any further stuns are completely useless.

There are tokens and other effects which can grant Freedom or Mind Blank stacks. It's important to note that these are not Shrug Off effects- they won't do anything to help clear a root which has already taken effect. All they'll do is help prevent the next controls from landing for as long, or at all. If you're worried that someone is about to use a control on you, you'd need to use the Token of Freedom preemptively, rather than waiting for the control to land and then trying to shake it off.

Buff stacks decay more slowly than debuffs: 5 per round, or 4 per round if you have slotted the Bravery defensive feat. So once you've built up a lot of Freedom, your stun immunity will be pretty high for a while, but it will eventually decay to the point that someone can land another stun (and push your Freedom back up).

Where else can I learn about stacking?

This video has some great stacking demonstrations, and examples of a variety of different options.

One of the core principles underlying the design of PFO is that the primary content is conflict with other players.

So it occurs to me to wonder: If one day, all the members of the Northern Coalition just stopped logging in, how much content would be left?

For non-NC members reading this, I have some questions:

* Would you be satisfied with a PFO where everyone just farmed escalations, gathered tansy, and crafted increasingly pretty suits of armor, with no significant quantity of PVP content?

* Do you feel comfortable that if everyone on the map were playing the same way you do, there would be enough content to keep the game interesting and afloat?

* Have you seriously considered engaging in content creation? Have you done so? If not why not?

* Have you seriously considered initiating hostilities with anyone who isn't NC? Have you done so? If not why not?

* If the NC is the sole target of all non-NC content creators, how long do you think that dynamic can realistically be expected to survive?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The EoX has established our borders, shown on the following map, for resource, escalation, and holding claims. We consider anyone harvesting resources, attacking escalations, or establishing holdings to be hostile, unless given prior permission from EoX leadership. Any non-hostile individuals are free to travel our land, trade, buy/sell at auction houses, as well as bank.

Territory map

You may contact any of the following people for more information about the above statement:

Kobold Cleaver - Agent Provocateur
Barack Obama - POTUS
Bill S. Preston - Esquire
Jessica Rabbit - Pattycake Expert
Andius - Bitter, Bitter Man
Neil deGrasse Tyson - Astrophysicist
Ryan Dancey - Goblinworks CEO

The above post is purely parodic and was made solely for purposes of amusing myself.

I wrote this back in June:

Realistically, landed companies should not have to, and are not going to, deploy live defensive troops to their holding to just sit there guarding for the full duration of the PVP window. People want to play the game, not sit around idle. What that means is that the holding needs to have sufficient defenses to resist capture for several minutes while the defenders scramble to stop what they're doing (nearby, of course!) and go join the fight.

A mechanic like DAoC's where an attacker has to spend 10+ minutes battering a gate or two and defeating some NPC guards and a tower lord in order to capture the keep, and where the holding's owners are notified as soon as aggressive contact is made, means that property capture is likely to involve pitched battles and "meaningful human interaction". In contrast, a mechanic where a keep can be captured silently and quickly with no combat mechanic would minimize human interaction and lead either to a dynamic where people sit around bored not having fun to defend their towers, or give that up as a chump's game and just go tag into each other's holdings without ever reliably finding a fight.

I hope we can take this as a lesson learned from WoT and build the conflict systems for Holdings and Outposts with a little more... conflict.

Just sign the contract, cut your palm, and then put your hand on the crystal.

Thanks, that's all we need for now.

Come ta Crazee Guurzak's House o' Shinee Rokks fer alla yer Copper Ore needs. Kreuz Bernstein am stocked up wif lotsa orangey rokks dats bery pritty an' you should come git lots of em.

Peepul wots goin to an' frum Kreuz Bernstein is sayf frum gittin murdered in da fayce by orcs. Howevur, pleez be keerful not ta go up on da Zombie Kitten Mountain cuz you's likely ta git wompd.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Golgotha is stocking the markethouse in Kreuz with lots of copper. We encourage all buyers looking for copper to come to Kreuz, and we will be respecting the safety of any travelers through the surrounding plains and forests. We strongly discourage any travelers or claim-jumpers from climbing into the adjacent mountain hexes. If you'd like to use the AH there for any other North/South trade, your business is absolutely welcome.

In light of the upcoming reputation changes, I'd like to propose that we select a centrally located tower in nobody's A ring, designate it The Hill, and kill each other there on a regular basis. The holder of The Hill should post their PVP window information in this thread after each day's excitement.

I nominate hex -12.6. Anyone have a better idea?

Critical Hits: Got to sometimes feel like, oh my god, life’s so good.

What happens when I crit?

Nothing. By default, critical hits have no inherent effect; you must slot feats with "on critical" effects in order to gain any benefit whatsoever from successful crits.

OK, what are these "on critical" feats?

There are only 3 types:

1) The longbow attack "Impact Critical Shot" has a knockdown and knockback effect on crit.
2) The wizard role feature "Evoker" applies a bunch of effects on crit: a DOT, a will defense debuff, a base attack debuff, a perception debuff, and a slow.
3) The Critical Reactive feats offer a variety of on-crit effects and are the primary method for most players to exploit crits.
* Deafening Critical: debuffs base attack and perception
* Exhausting Critical: reduces max stamina and stamina regen
* Sickening Critical: applies a stackable DOT and debuffs Reflex
* Staggering Critical: applies a slow
* Stunning Critical: percentage chance for a 2 second stun.

If you're not slotting any of those feats then your criticals do exactly nothing.

Should I even bother?

Probably, but not necessarily. If you're built as a pure caster, the critical reactives are the only reactive feats you have access to; you may as well choose 2 and slot them. If you're a fighter or rogue, you have access to role-specific reactives you may like better, but even so, if you choose not to slot any critical reactives then every crit you inflict is an opportunity missed. You'll have to decide for yourself if the benefit of doubling up on role reactives justifies the lost potential of all your crits.

Note that the value of "improved critical" (and to a lesser extent "precise") on the attacks you choose to slot is negated if your crits don't do anything, so keep your attack repertoire in mind as you think about this.

OK then, I want to crit hard and often! How do I crit more?

The full math is boring and nerdy; here's the short version.

In order to have any chance to crit your attack roll must equal or exceed the target's defense; partial hits can never crit. So you want to improve your base attack bonus and your category attack bonus, you want to train into and use T2 or T3 weapons and attacks, and you want to use attacks with the Precise modifier.

Some attacks have the Improved Critical modifier. This will obviously improve your chance of rolling a crit, but ONLY if you successfully landed a full hit; when given a choice, you should generally prefer Precise over Improved Crit.

You'll also crit more often versus opponents with weak defenses versus your offense type (reflex, will, or fortitude; all weapon attacks are reflex), and opponents with lower tier armor. In addition, there's a crit chance reduction based on armor weight class: you'll crit more often versus opponents in robes than those in plate.

Crit chance is normalized for attack speed, so you have a better chance to get a crit with one slow attack than one fast attack.

I'm a big nerd.

That's not a question, but fine, here's the math.

Whenever you make an attack, you add a random result from 1-200 (curved based on tier) to your attack bonuses (from Base Attack, specific Attack, and effects) and compare against the target's Defense (which is a sum of Base Defense from armor, specific defense, and effects).

If the result is less than the target's defense, the margin of failure is converted into reduced damage.

If the result is equal to or greater than the target's defense, we then check for a crit:
* Find the margin of success (e.g., you needed to hit 80 and got 90, so your MoS is 10).
* Add that to improved critical (if your feat has Improved Critical +20, you're now up to 30).
* Subtract the target's crit resistance (only from armor right now; 4 for light, 16 for medium, and 32 for heavy; so if the target's in medium, that 30 crit chance goes back down to 14).

We then take the square root of that number and multiply by the attack speed to get the crit percentage chance. 14 has a root of 3.74, so if you had that on a 2.3 speed attack your final crit chance would be approximately 8.6%.

I'm apparently not that big a nerd.

Still not a question. OK, here's a real world example.

An attacker using a T1 Longbow and Overdraw versus an opponent in Pot Plate+2 with Unbreakable 4.

First, let's figure out the total attack value:
* he's got a T1 weapon so we'll take the low roll from 3d200. Let's say we got the median T1 roll of 42.
* he's trained up Base Attack and Ranged Attack to a total of +30.
* Overdraw has Precise +10.
His total attack value is 82. This is versus Reflex as with all physical attacks.

Now the defense value:
* all T1 armor has a base defense of 50.
* he gets an extra 3 points of reflex from his armor feat matching 3 keywords on his armor.
* he has Reflex Bonus 2 trained, for +8 more.
* he has Lightning Reflexes 2 slotted, for a final +4.
His total defense value is 65.

82 >= 65, so the attack will do full damage and we have a chance to crit. Hurray! Now we do the crit roll.

* Margin of Success is 82-65 = 17
* Overdraw has Improved Crit 30
* Heavy armor has crit resistance of 32
* Net margin is 17 + 30 - 32 = 15 points.
* Square root of 15 is 3.87.
* Attack speed of Overdraw is 3.5
So your final chance to crit this attack is 13.55%.

Dude, you must be like the smartest orc ever.

You really don't get this "question" thing, do you.

How do orcs roll?

...

There's no net advantage to taking and holding 6 or 10 or 30 towers if non-citizens can come into town and use my upgraded facilities without penalty or risk. We need the option to set a blacklist (or a whitelist with a default-deny) to make infrastructure competition at all meaningful.

4GB system: close all browsers, shut down all unnecessary processes, open one game client, wince as you open TS and hope it doesn't make everything too hitchy.

12GB system: Two game clients, TS and IRC on the second screen as well as multiple browser windows, smooth as silk.

An 8GB memory kit will set you back less than $100, and if you're currently running with 4GB or less it's the best and cheapest way to dramatically improve PFO performance.

Tansy can be used as an ingredient in the production process for both types of T2 rogue implements- the Journeyman's Rogue Kit and Professional's Rogue Kit- as well as a wide variety of offensive and beneficial consumables at all three tiers:

Apprentice's Smokestick
Apprentice's Overwhelm
Apprentice's Ward Gel
Apprentice's Black Fester
Apprentice's Cinder Bomb
Apprentice's Woundweal
Apprentice's Spellscorch

Journeyman's Smokestick
Journeyman's Fire
Journeyman's Thunder
Journeyman's Choking Bomb
Journeyman's Cinder Bomb
Journeyman's Ifrit's Blood
Journeyman's Bodybalm
Journeyman's Bloodblock
Journeyman's Resistance
Journeyman's Ambrosia
Journeyman's Fortifying Powder
Journeyman's Soothe Syrup
Journeyman's Antiplague
Journeyman's Antitoxin
Journeyman's Pox Burster
Journeyman's Ward Gel
Journeyman's Overwhelm
Journeyman's Spellscorch
Journeyman's Black Fester
Journeyman's Longsleep
Journeyman's Bloodfire
Journeyman's Digitalis
Journeyman's Necrosis
Journeyman's Omen

Master's Bodybalm
Master's Longsleep
Master's Antitoxin
Master's Cure Potion

This message brought to to you by Concerned Orcs Against Defamation of Tansy. COADAT would like you to know that this lovely and useful flower deserves much more respect than it's been getting or us gunna start bashin hedz.

All light blades grant Subterfuge, but a fighter who wants to train his light blade feature needs to collect Martials.

Can we get a martial-based light weapon (e.g. gladius) for Dex fighters?

"Miscreant" attacked me with a shortbow this morning. I returned fire and taught him the error of his ways; however, I noticed after combat was over that I had an Aggressor flag ticking down on the right side of my screen.

Is it possible that taking an extra shot at his corpse might have caused this, or is there an exploit allowing miscreants to cause innocents to flag themselves? For reference, I don't believe I lost any rep.

Just realized I haven't seen any clear statement on whether we will be able to build POIs (eg watchtowers) in Red X hexes, or if they will be unbuildable like monster hexes. I think when I did the math on hexes available for base camps it works out pretty close if transitions are not buildable, but there could be other explanations for that.

I assume that, sooner rather than later, General will be going away and replaced with a Settlement-wide channel. However, Settlement chat is not adequate for the communication needs of our complex economy. With the designed inter-reliance of settlements for training and crafting facilities, we need a method to coordinate activities with our close partner settlements without broadcasting to the world what we're doing.

We can of course go to external tools to do this; however, I'd much prefer that we beef up the in-game chat system to support this. We're going to need at least one of these two improvements:

Either 1) an ability to designate a mechanical community of settlements which would create a chat channel linking all settlements in the group; or 2) an option to create an ad-hoc channel and password protect it so that we can build the chat communities we need without further developer help.

If we can't get both, the second option is strongly preferable since it solves the immediate problem but also gives us much more flexibility.

I'd also really really like to see the option to show multiple chat channels simultaneously by dragging tabs into their own windows.

In the early days of any sandbox game, things are chaotic, undefined, exciting, and full of opportunity and rapid change. As time goes on, alliances stabilize, tactical improvisation evolves into doctrine, the pace of political change slows and then stops; what once was sand, is now concrete.

For anyone who wants to skip right past the fun part of the server timeline and jump ahead to endgame stasis, here are a few simple steps:

1) Grow your faction as large as possible before the game starts

2) NAP everybody

3) Have assigned seating towers for all the major powers on the server (bonus, strongly incents the minor settlements to join up with a larger group as quickly as possible!)

4) Draw borders which clearly delineate the approved zones of control for each power. Fence up that map- don't leave any uncertainty about which hex is whose!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This honestly is not meant as an attack on any individual or group. Striving to reduce uncertainty is natural, understandable, and inevitable, and if I hadn't already repeatedly seen the results I'd probably be doing the same thing. Please for the love of gaming don't do it. Removing uncertainty may be good for you but it is bad, bad, bad for the game.

Our sandbox will inevitably turn into concrete over the course of time. If it takes long enough, GW will have expanded the map or provided other options which prevent the whole system from grinding to a halt the way Eve did before wormhole space.

However, if we work hard enough at it, we can significantly accelerate the slide to stasis and make sure that we reach gridlock long before the devs have a chance to give us those new options. If this happens, there's a serious possibility that the whole game will fail.

For as long as possible, please do your best to keep friendships and conflicts local, specific, and discrete. Embrace the uncertainty of poorly-defined borders and towers with no clear and permanent ownership.

Let's find out who owns that tower organically. It'll be fun.

Just between us,
I think it's time for us to realize:
The spaces in between
Leave room
For you and I to grow

I massaged the public data on attacks and expendables and uploaded them into a free web database host. If you want to see all of the abilities which can apply a given effect, or which can exploit that effect, just put that effect name (or an adequately unique fragment thereof) into the search box and then change the "template" dropdown to either Standard Effects or Conditional Effects.

Dis dayturbayse am pritty orcy. It's ugly, unfriendly, and not too smart; I'm confident that much better tools will appear as the game and community mature. This will do as an MVP until something more advanced comes along.

clicky

So Goblinworks has a plan (or "have a plan" if you're that kind of person) for how the next several weeks of development are going to go. While they're busy with that, I thought we could take a little time to look farther down the road.

I thought it might be useful to provide GW with some community feedback on what our priorities are and what we'd like to see coming next, once they get a chance to take a breath from the EE release crunch. Maybe they have a timeline for all of this already, but if there's a strong community response on a particular feature perhaps they could consider sorting that effort closer to the front of the queue.

Please visit this SurveyMonkey page and sort the features listed by your own preferred order of implementation.

Survey results are viewable here.

One of the core premises of the PFO design is that actions have consequences. Players who want to behave in ways that only those immune to consequences can afford to, will strive vigorously to find ways around accountability systems. One of the big ways to do this will be playing silly buggers with settlement and company membership.

1a) Aggressors annoy Benevolence until they declare a feud. Then, everyone abandons the Aggressors company, join a new company Antagonists, and start the cycle again.

1b) Aggressors annoy Benevolence until they declare a feud. Then, they get a bunch of heavy hitters to swarm into the company and crush Benevolence all day erryday.

What happens if we decouple "can freely attack" from "can be freely attacked" in the context of wars and feuds? Imagine this scenario:

* If you were in the target company when the feud was declared AND are still in that company, you can freely attack that company's feud enemies.

* If you were in the target company when the feud was declared OR are now in that company, you are freely attackable by that company's feud enemies.

In other words, if you leave or join a feuding company while the feud is in effect, you will lose/not gain the feud's freedom to attack, but will retain/gain the feud's vulnerability to being attacked. This will encourage people to think of company membership as a relatively static thing rather than something to be discarded when inconvenient.

2) Players create a bunch of alts in Thornkeep which perform various kinds of harassment which cannot be linked back to the Aggressors and which feuding or warring the Aggressors will not stop.

I don't see any way around this without making TK citizens suspect by default. I don't think I want to see newbies freely attackable if they step out of the high-security hexes, but they should probably become attackable much more readily than a player-settlement citizen would.

Anybuddy wot's seen a zombie attack knows dat a undead horde can cawze a lot of propurty dammaj. Even if you an yer luvd wunz survives da attak, yer life savins could maybe end up ruint. Recoverin and rebuildifyin from a major shamble kin tayk munths or yeers.

Fortchunatlee fer wurried Base Camp owners, dere's a way ta protekt yer finanshul investmint an' peece ub mind. Come blah wif Guurzak abowt gettin da rite plan ta suit you an yer famblee's needs.

Da Iron Tusk coveridge area am anyting wifin abowt a half duzzin hexes of Gogoblah, give or tayk a cuppul. Anywun tinkin abowt settin up a Base Camp wifin dat area am strongly encurraged to purchase homeownurs inshurance frum Iron Tusk, since dis am a known danger zone fer undead aktivitee.

Strongly encurraged, if you gets wut me sayin.

Strongly.

Nub come cryin to Guurzak if yer pretty base camp gets ripped down and tramples into da mud by a couple hundred groany corpsez, or a big pack of orcs, or wutevver, an you didn't have no inshurance.

You should get da inshurance.

as title- it seems odd to me that they wouldn't, but it doesn't seem to be explicitly stated anywhere and I'm in conversation with a TD backer who can't vote.

We that the current plan is for a marketplace to use a large plot. This is a costly choice- it makes sense for settlements with a commerce emphasis to choose a market instead of a 3-role training facility or other large building, but that's a difficult tradeoff to make for most towns.

I'm not sure how practical it is for those other towns to do completely without some kind of trading post, though. Relying on face-to-face trades or long distance shopping trips for daily consumption items seems impractical to the point of punishment, so I'm thinking maybe we should propose a smaller, limited marketplace option for non-commerce settlements.

Maybe a trading post could not have durable goods, only consumables and components. Another possible limitation could be that only residents could use it, unlike large markets which could be open to the public. There could also be a cap on the total volume of goods available for trade, although I'm not sure exactly how that would work.

Should such a post be medium or small? Or should there be both, with the small shop even more limited than the medium one?

On a related note, I'm very curious as to whether a marketplace will be a template option for the WotT settlement designs, and if so how much we'll have to give up to get one.

I expect the residents of Thornkeep and Fort Inevitable to swarm like locusts over the resources in the hexes surrounding their protected zones, safe in the knowledge that the reputation system and the nearby hex border will protect them unless caught in the very act of raiding an outpost. What tools if any should we be given to protect ourselves from this scourge?

Someone proposed a couple of weeks back that players who declined to participate in the world's social structures should not be offered the protections of the world's social systems either. I'm not sure if declaring all safeholders to be hostis humani generis if caught outside of a guarded hex is quite the right level of response, but we need some way to make a credible threat if we're going to be able to effectively discourage undesirable and antisocial behavior.

I'm doing some mapping work and it'd be awesome if I didn't have to rebuild the map from scratch. I'm sure there are others who would appreciate it too.

Yes, it's alpha, yes, balance tuning never ends. With that understood, here's my thinking and feedback based on the current state of the game I see:

There's no reason to play a fighter.

You can wear medium-to-heavy armor that a) slows you down, and b) doesn't protect against energy attacks, or, you can play a wizard and kite, avoiding all damage from slow melees and easily penetrating their armor.

Speed is life on the open field, and I haven't seen anything that fighters get to make up for it. Apparently nobody else has either, as the alpha streams are showing more and more casters as the weeks pass by.

I'm not sure what I would do to fix this. I hope the devs have some good ideas. Some old posts by Ryan suggest that units in formation should be highly resistant to magical attacks, but I hope that fighters are not forced into the soldier career in order to be meaningful.

I'm wondering for roleplay/story purposes if the new flesh comes unblemished and pristine, or identical to what you left behind. (If the latter, why isn't it all leaky and holey from whatever just killed you?)

Long live the new flesh...

I'm using Nightdrifter's excellent training calculator to play with some builds, and I'm having a very hard time raising Con without investing in a trade skill.

I need Fort Bonus 3 to hit Cleric 6, needing 12 Con. I can just barely get there if I raise hits to 12, power to 18 (!), and buy Great Fort, Toughness and Recovery Bonus.

Two levels later I need 14 Con for Heavy Armor Prof 2 which is a requirement for Crusader 6, and there's just no way to get there without a tradeskill.

Shield attacks boost Con, but that's not going to help much since you need Strength you don't have for Heavy Melee in order to raise those attacks. And there are no side skills based on Con- there's no Endurance or anything similar, just as in PF TT.

So based on what I'm seeing so far, a con-based tradeskill is actually a hard requirement to level to Tier 2 as a cleric. Am I overlooking anything?

I think everyone's aware of the possibility that the week 10 draft may have a lot of surprises. Settlements may get bounced to a completely different part of the map with no warning, and no ability to respond.

If this weren't a political game, that wouldn't really matter: your second draft choice is the place you want if you can't have your first choice, so you take the most-preferred spot you can get and you're happy with that. However, that's not really the case on a map where your choice of location depends a lot on who your neighbors are. The spot you like second best now might turn out to be the spot you like least of all when you discover who ended up right next to you.

A surprise ending at week 10 means that settlements will have little or no control over who their neighbors are for most or all of EE. While I don't think this is "unfair", I also don't think it's desirable. We've spent 10 weeks building friendships and enmities, and adjusting our map positioning based on those relationships. I think the good of the game is best served by allowing us some mechanism for preserving that dynamic.

What I think I would like to see is for the land rush to close with a lightning phase, processed as fast as GW can update the map. The phase should end after a random number of rounds (probably somewhere in the 5-10 range), or end immediately if a round closes with no change from the previous round.

This would give players the chance to stay close to allies, far from enemies, or otherwise react to other settlement movements which affect the preferability of different map locations. Finding yourself locked into a map location far from your friends and surrounded by foes is not something that should happen to anyone without at least some chance to do something about it.

It appears to me that I have to spend XP on an armor feat chain for each role I want to train- even if it's the same armor type. For example, if my Fighter 20 with maxed heavy armor (unbreakable?) wants to train Cleric, I'm going to have to train heavy armor all over again (Crusader).

We know that we'll have multiple options for armor training within each class- ie fighters can choose to train heavy or medium armor once this system is in effect. Should you be able to coast on another class's armor training, or should multiclassers just use this mandatory opportunity to train a different armor style?

So I'm looking at the crafting recipes and I'm thinking "how do we have any frame of reference for how much any of this stuff should cost?"

In Eve, the NPC-produced goods give industrialists a frame of reference. If this gun costs X by default, then if I make that gun I need to charge less than X. If I need Y minerals to make the gun, then I need to pay less than X/Y for my minerals. And so on.

Are there similar reference points in the PFO economy, or are the first several months of EE going to see prices oscillating wildly as we try to figure out how much a unit of ore is really worth relative to the coin income rate from monster hunting?

The Officer skill which has the formation leadership features is based on Personality. So is the Seneschal skill which will be used for infrastructure management.

Being either an Officer or a Seneschal makes you a very high priority target- for focused fire, or for assassins, or both.

The natural fits for personality skills among the core classes are Paladins, Sorcerers, and Bards.

Sorcerers are squishy. Bards aren't frontline troops either. So an LG settlement can field very tanky paladin officers and hard-to-assassinate building managers, while everyone else is left with choosing between robes or frolicking to protect their leadership assets.

Clerics might make a decent alternative if there's enough personality-oriented stuff in their channel energy design to make developing these skills practical. I just hope that we don't end up with a scenario where anyone who wants to manage a building makes a dowsing sage animal-handling persuasive bluffing fighter.

We've been given only a little bit of info about factional sects and conflict, and the system gets very little discussion. But from what I've seen, this mechanism will actually have a lot of impact on how we play, how we train, and how often we fight. I think the factions will turn out to be pretty important.

Here's what I've gleaned so far:

* NPC factions will provide specialized training not available at standard role trainers
* Accessing more advanced faction training will require you to raise your standing in the faction via unique quests/achievements
* Raising your standing high enough in any faction will put you in permanent hostility with high-standing members of any opposing factions.
* You may also opt-in to factional hostility at any standing if you wish.
* Faction support will be minimal in the NPC cities.
* Standing quests for evil factions will often put players in conflict with other evil factions.
* Religions and several Assassin guilds were presented as two specific examples of NPC factions. Eagle Knights, Hellknights, and Aspis Consortium have also been mentioned.

Here are some of the points I'm curious about:

* Are faction houses small or medium? Or are they upgrade forks for other buildings?
* Has the design progressed to a stage where a list of first-phase factions could be published?
* Does each faction have exactly one permanently-opposed faction, or do some or all have multiples?
* Will faction opposition lines remain generally static, or will there be ongoing storyline changes which alter the hostility map?
* Will clerics be forced to raise religious faction standing to attackable levels in order to unlock high-level cleric training?
* Will clerics be forced to raise religious faction standing to attackable levels in order to unlock high-level deity-specific training?
* Would a Temple of Norgorber (or a Cathedral with Norgorber support) also count as a Skinsaw faction house for assassin training, or is that two different investments?

So, the alpha docs say that you cannot refill your quiver or charge stone during combat. Refilling out of combat is not addressed. Do you have to actually carry a consumable supply of arrows which is depleted as you refill after each battle, or are you assumed to have an infinite ammo supply in your pockets that just isn't accessible during the heat of battle?

Ok, so let's start with basic terminology:

* blue means part of your social graph, not targetable with hostile effects.

* red means hostile, i.e. freely attackable due to temporary flags or war/feud

* grey means everyone else, attackable with consequences.

I'd like to add some options for organization leaders to set diplomatic stances for their organizations which will propagate into their members' huds:

* green for designated non-targets. This would apply to mechanical greys who are manually given a free pass- I.e. trading partners, people too scary to mess with, etc. You should still be able to see that someone is tagged green even if they are also mechanically red. Green tags should be possible at an individual, company, or nation granularity.

* We might need 2 shades of green- bluish green for should not attack under any circumstances, and light green for do not attack as long they are not misbehaving in some way.

* Orange for designated targets of opportunity- the opposite of green. frustrate as convenient, attack if you can provoke an opportunity to do so.

* I'd love to have the option for temporary passes- flag someone green for two hours or two weeks but then the setting automatically expires.

* I wonder if there are scenarios where distant members of your graph should become mechanically attackable. It's conceivable an Iomedae worshipper and a Lamashtu worshipper could be in different settlements of the same nation. If they're both "for the cause" in their church and they're willing to brave the political fallout, should they be free to have it? I could see arguments either way.

* green and orange settings should propagate down throughout a nation but be overridden by conflicting settings at a more local level. (Friction!) This also implies a manual grey setting to simply cancel a stance from higher up.

In the existing feud mechanic, companies can spend influence to declare another company as a feud target. Once active, a feud makes all members of the feuding company appear hostile to all members of the feuded party, and vice versa. Pvp with feud enemies carries no reputation or alignment consequences, but this is not considered meaningless pvp because of the influence cost of establishing the feud. Feud targets do not have to consent to the feud.

What if, instead of declaring themselves hostile to all members of a specific feuded company, a company wished to declare themselves hostile to anyone at a specific geographic location, and was willing to spend influence to do so? How is the scenario meaningfully different?

Obviously, the best way to do this is simply claim the hex and build a holding there, then set no-trespassing policies as desired. However, some hexes such as badlands and monster homes cannot be claimed in this manner. For hexes which cannot be fully claimed, there should still be some mechanism for a company to assert a certain level of exclusionary interest- IF they are willing to pay the feud price to do so. (Perhaps multiple companies might plant flags in the same hex- wouldn't that be interesting!)

I was looking over the full map and looking at the placement of Riverwatch, Thornkeep, and Fort Inevitable, and it occurred to me that the alignments of the 3 starter cities coordinates with their geographic placement on the map: The lawful good safehold in the top left, the lawful evil on the bottom left (although sliding a bit towards NE?), and the chaotic neutral bandit nest on the middle right.

No real point to make, just thought it was mildly interesting.

In this post, Ryan left the door open for considering letting portions of the map be consequence-free PVP areas. I was thinking this over- both whether it's a good idea at all, and where these areas would be if so, and it occurred to me that the grey hexes are relatively uncommon, but distributed throughout the map, unclaimable as holdings, and also home to rare and valuable resources which can't be found elsewhere.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. It makes the acquisition of top end gear more perilous and rewards groups who can put together the organization to successfully gather in a very hostile environment, while also providing an outlet for players who want to blow off some steam without worrying about consequence every once in a while or who just feel like a break from complex politics.

It would be easy enough to come up with a lore justification why the concentrated presence of so much otherworldly material overwhelms your normal ethical senses and makes everyone else appear hostile.

Tom's Hardware likes ATI much better than NVidia in the current generation, but many game developers seen to prioritize optimizing GeForce performance (or leveraging GameWorks features) over a level playing field, so I'm hesitant.

Would appreciate feedback from anyone running the alpha on a Catalyst, or from devs with thoughts on the subject...

How do you know if a goblin camp is part of an escalation or just random goblins? (Or are there no "just random goblins")

Do infections spread evenly and uniformly, radiating from the center in a consistent manner, or is it somewhat random as to how an infection will spread?

Is there/will there be some way to get an overview of an escalation's extent and strength, or do you need to patrol every hex in the area to feel confident you've got things under control before challenging the leader?

I think declaring a war against a settlement should make you immune to law/chaos penalties for breaking laws in that settlement's territory. Have there been any dev comments specifically addressing that issue?

Oi! Lats line up an lissen, us gonna blah abowt bashin hummies an gettin paid ta do id!

Iron Tusk am a band ob mersa... mercer... bashers for hire. Us am speshully trained for military operayshuns, sieges, an taykin or holdin towers an forts, an us live in Gogoblah when us not owt on some contract.

Dis da best life any greenskin could want. If you's orc-blooded, an likes linin up wif sum of da brutalest, fearsomest, bestest bashers on da Crusaydur Road, an gettin ta bash heds an get paid fer doin it, blah at me an join da Iron Tusk.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Iron Tusk Band is an RP-PvP mercenary company based in Golgotha, part of the Xeilian Empire. The company will be dedicated to racial roleplay as orcs and half-orcs, and to formation fighting and territorial-control combat as described in this dev blog. As a Lawful Evil, high-reputation oriented group, we hope to be seen as a valuable and dangerous battlefield resource- someone to be hired to do the things that good-aligned forces simply can't, while firmly committing to honor our contracts and contribute positively to the color of the game world.

Iron Tusk is alt-friendly. We welcome the player who wants to take an occasional break from a good-aligned main character, or explore the soldier career path for a change of pace. We expect that many of those who try us out will have so much fun that their greenskin alt becomes their main.

Contact Guurzak or any of the Golgotha leadership with questions or contract opportunities, or visit Xeilias.com to apply.

Hoowah orcs!

There are some people on the boards who came to PFO from PF TT, with no background in online gaming. Let's put some recommendations together for these people to get some basic familiarity with this kind of game before EE starts.

Dark Age of Camelot is old, but still some of the best PVP of any MMO. The main adventuring areas are all non-PVP, but there are battlegrounds for every level range and the frontiers for whenever you're ready. And there's a two week free trial, and a solid tutorial which ramps into an easy leveling path. Info and client download are at darkageofcamelot.com

I think this would be a great option for someone new to MMOs to get oriented while waiting for EE to open up. Anyone have a better idea?

In Shadowbane, the politics of a server would reliably collapse into two factions within a matter of months. A large part of the reason for this was that the size of the map was small enough, and there were enough fast travel options, that anyone could, and did, participate in a battle anywhere on the map with just a few minutes notice. So, the outcome of any given battle was dictated, not by how many allies you had nearby, but how many allies you had anywhere in the world. Game theory says that this scenario will inevitably devolve, like American democracy, to a 2-party system: small factions merge in order to gain advantage over slightly larger factions, who find allies of their own to get the advantage back; meanwhile, the independent faction over there sees this spiral and looks for allies of their own out of self defense. Soon, the whole map is either blue or red.

In Eve, sheer logistic distance makes this sort of political collapse impossible. Your friends on the other side of the map are literally hours of travel time away; they're not part of your political dynamic in any useful way. You can't be an ally to someone in a space where you can't project power.

Based on the travel numbers in early blog posts that you could run on foot across an old large hex in about 3:45 and that fast travel was 5 times faster than that, that means each of the hexes on the current map is about 15 seconds of fast travel time. If that's correct, we'll be able to travel corner to corner in less than 12 minutes. I don't think that's enough to prevent a 2-faction collapse.

I'm not sure there's a way around this other than either building a significantly larger map- even the big map is only 20 minutes corner to corner if I've done the math right- or to simply get rid of fast travel altogether.

And I think that would be a good thing. If you can fast travel from Fort Inevitable to the Emerald Spire in 3 minutes, the landscape in between becomes flyover country; people have no reason to know or care about local politics or services at a destination when home is just a few minutes away. The longer it takes to get from point A to point B, the more likely you are to find something interesting along the way, and to stay longer once you get there. You're more likely to spend most of your time in and around a smaller local region, and long journeys become adventures rather than routine commutes.

Please consider eliminating fast travel, both for the sake of preventing Katamari Dacy politics, and for the sake of keeping the world large enough to be wondrous.

If new characters start at 1000, and if the highest useful settlement threshold (i.e. the level at which all T3 structures and advances are permitted) is higher than 1000, then that means that newbies cannot join that settlement at birth.

I don't think this is a good idea; I think that someone who joins the game specifically to play with Group X should be able to move to their desired settlement immediately if they like. So either the highest threshold needs to be no higher than 1000, or newbies need to start higher.

I'm undecided on whether a 1000 threshold is high enough to be an interesting decision; it seems like building to T3 would be a no-brainer if the bar you have to get across is that low. I think something in the 3-5000 range would require a little more decision making where some settlements would say "you know, we're actually better off capping at T2 and keeping more mid-rep people that the higher filter would kick out."

On the other hand, I don't see any downside to starting newbies with max rep; they're innocent until proven guilty, and if they're guilty it'll drop fast enough anyway. Plus that eliminates the need for a separate mechanism for punishing newbykillers specifically; the penalty for a max rep murder is already going to be punitive.

tl;dr interestingly high settlement rep thresholds probably mean that new characters should start with max rep.

Poi is Hawaiian taro pudding. It's a silly thing to call an inn, dock, or manor house "a pudding". And we're not even going to consider the possibility of using a modern acronym for "point of interest" as part of our in-character language. We need a better word.

The most appropriate word is "outpost", but that's already in use for the next tier down. Even if we came up with a replacement word for what is currently called outposts, the current usage is probably too deeply ingrained in our culture already to be able to make a shift without massive potential for confusion and miscommunication.

So, what do we call the central feature of a hex, that isn't either PoI or Outpost? What term can equally aptly refer to a shrine, an inn, a dock, a manor house, or a watchtower?

Seat
Steading
Holding
Estate
Domain
Demesne
Dominion
Claim
Freehold
Fief or Fiefdom

I like the sound of Fief. It's short and simple, it has the medieval/feudal color appropriate to the setting, and historical fiefs could be either independent holdings or subordinate to a higher lord.

Anyone got a better idea?

OK, here's the info we have so far:

* Each character can belong to up to 3 companies.
* Only the primary company can be a sponsored company.
* Your primary company is awarded full influence based on your achievements.
* Your secondary company earns 50% of the influence that your primary does.
* Your tertiary company gains no influence.

OK. So we all have a pretty clear idea what primary company membership is about: This is the chartered company that represents your main group identity in the game. CCs can establish settlements or own holdings on behalf of their settlements.

And tertiary companies are pretty clearly just a fancy chat channel: these are for real-world friends to stay connected, or inter-settlement communities of interest like trade guilds or scholarly associations. With no influence gain they can't do much in terms of game mechanic impact... but that also means that declining influence gain after 50 members is irrelevant, so they can grow without mechanical limits.

The question becomes, what do we do with secondary companies? A 2C does gain influence but cannot claim territory for their settlement. This means that either they claim a standalone PoI (and must defend it without help from settlement guards), or they use their influence for other things. What kind of other things? Hmmm...

It seems to me that the optimal use for secondary companies based on the info we have so far is feud mechanisms. Where NPC factions give you static hostility with their opposing factions, 2C membership gives you the possibility of constantly changing enemies as feuds begin and end. And while settlements and CC's must allocate influence to major projects like PoI's and wars, 2C's will have the freedom to spend all of their influence on feuds. Basically, joining a 2C is way to turn more names red.

I could see some typical 2C's being things like religious cults, tree-huggers vs bunny-haters, racial factions, or any other grouping intended to generate conflict with opposed groups.

https://goblinworks.com/blog/alignment-and-reputation/ gives us the numbers:

* New players start with 1000 reputation
* You gain 1 rep each hour in which you haven't taken a rep hit
* That value increases by 0.25 for every 4 hours of good behavior.
* The hourly reputation bonus caps at 10.

Given those values, how long will it take a new player who takes no reputation hits to reach the cap of 7500?

Answer: 666 hours /played.

"If the victim was offered and rejected stand and deliver, the Outlaw loses no reputation for killing the target within five minutes of the rejection."

Without further controls, this means that chaotic players who flag Outlaw can kill with impunity: Issue an impossible S&D which the victim is forced to reject, and then murder away.

There are only two options for avoiding this abuse: create a complicated mechanism for evaluating the reasonableness of a S&D demand; or, get rid of the non-penalty mechanic and treat rejected bandits who kill their targets like any other murderers.

I'm not a fan of a reasonableness-judging mechanic; more often than not, solving an abuse by adding complexity creates more new abuses than it resolves.

What happens if all bandit attacks are subject to reputation penalty? Obviously, this provides incentive to the bandits to make more reasonable demands. Does it eliminate any incentive for merchants to comply? Assuming that a bandit can afford to take a few rep hits without completely trashing his score, I think there's still enough risk/reward to justify taking the occasional unreasonable merchant's life and goods.

And, realistically, even the most charming of brigands shouldn't be able to have a maxed out rep; a life of crime may not automatically peg your rep in the negatives if you play reasonably, but you're not going to get any "shining example to mankind" awards either.

Guurzak say if bandits not get tribute, dem get bad names when dey clomp.