Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co. wrote:
Ok, Francis. :)
Bluddwolf wrote:
Oh, that's very, very interesting. Fascinating. I'm curious though, how will you accomplish all this when you can't even defend you're own towers? Hmmmmm? :)
Tyveil wrote: Great to see this report. As for your comment that a constant presence (having to pvp every night) may begin to feel like work... There are some people that want to spend most of their time in this game PvP'ing. I'm encouraged that we can send those type of people to our borders or on escort missions and they will likely not be disappointed. While the rest of the company stays back in the relatively safer territory to PvE. Again, that's more my personal take, and not a claim that it's a problem. I think part of it right now is player density. In X months when we have N players, it may be very easy to sort out playstyles and "who's on duty." Right now, we have a pool of about 25 people, spread out over time zones, with significant variation in playtime. So the 7-10 people who might be on during the PvP window are forced by default to be on duty. This is where the contrast between the offense and the defense is visible. Defense is the strongest in war, but victory lies only in the offense, because the attacker can chose the time and place of their attack. In this sense, a small group that chooses their time and place to strike has an advantage over a larger group, perhaps many times over, because they will always be in the position of having to respond and mass forces. This is not a problem, and I think it is a good thing in that it makes smaller settlements more relevant than otherwise. But again, it means forcing people to be on duty at lower population densities.
Gpunk wrote: Entertaining for sure. Your math is wrong and you fail to disclose the defenders spawn point is +/- 40m from the tower but that's how it goes. Thanks for the fun! I learned a few new tricks. 1. The math is quite correct :) 2. I forgot about the rez point being farther away for defenders--that does favor defenders.
So we had our first large scale tower defense. It was a lot of fun, but we also think the PvP mechanics could be changed to make more sense/be more fun. Blunt Logic obliged us tonight by trying to take one of our towers, and so we broke off our escalation hunt to engage. Some thoughts: -At first we outnumbered them--we had 7 and they had 4, and so for a while we had the advantage on them. We were able to blast them out of the tower, and they tried to lure some of us out to even the odds, which was a good tactic on their part. -They started roaming from tower to tower, which forced us to split into reconnaissance elements. Again that was a good tactic. They called in reinforcements, so for a while they had a numbers advantage and were able to repel us. -At one point they had 9 characters to our 6, and got up to around 680 or so on one of our core towers. When we had 7 to their 9, we charged in, and were able to dislodge them, although we had several casualties. We got two more, and then when it was 9-9, everytime they came in we dropped them like flies. -I think there was a decent mix of types. They were mostly bowmen, melee, and wizards. We had a similar mix, but also clerics. So it was nice to see there was more than one way the cat was being skinned. -The big surprise for us was that enemy flagging worked the opposite of what we expected. In a PvP open hex, if you attack an invading group, all your group members get flagged and turn red. So instead of being able to tab target the aggressors who are invading your tower, you tab and attack on your party members. This is particularly a problem because you then can't heal your party and comrades. So there is a huge mechanical advantage to trying to steal a tower, because they defenders can't heal/buff/help each other. I highly recommend rethinking this. -It was a lot of fun. It was good content, we are happy we repelled the invaders, getting out Player Killer Achievements, and so on. On the other hand, HAVING to PvP every night to keep your towers seems like it might become work at some point. Not saying that's a problem, just may reflect preferences. Big thanks to Blunt Logic and Allegiant Gemstone Co. for providing content--you are worthy adversaries! P.S. Gpunk, Atheory, Memory, Pendragon, Ozack, Doc and the three other dudes, please PM me, I have your missing teeth.
TEO Cheatle wrote: They specifically said that they were going to fix part of the exploit in the next patch, and watch people to see if it becomes a problem on top of that. Then they deleted the conversation with all our notes so that no one could produce the exploit. That would make sense. A line like "Don't worry, we ware working on the exploit raised, thread deleted for security reasons" would be a heck of lot less confusing.
I just edited my post. Maybe this is common knowledge about bug reporting and I'm just dumb--I would have thought talking about something that isn't live should be talked about openly. It would seem different to me it was on the live servers--then you wouldn't want to say anything. Anyways, if that thread was deleted on purpose, why not post something simple like "Hey, we want to keep this under wraps while we work on it," then no one would be confused?
The current EE2 client (on test server) <there is a serious bug>. One of our Ozem's Vigil members (Quietus) posted about this in the EE forums on goblinworks out of concern for this being a potentially game-wrecking exploit in the economy. However, a couple of hours later that whole discussion has been erased--almost five pages of posts. 1) I'm worried about this--<potential exploit> Are you going to fix it? If it's left in, I don't feel good about using it, but if we don't and other settlements do, we are at a serious competitive disadvantage. 2) I don't understand why the thread was deleted--aren't we supposed to actively crowd-forge? I'm hoping this was a mistake--I can't begin to see how deleting exploit-feedback from the community helps the game. Any insight into this, both the exploit and thread-deletion? Thanks.
You have to admit it's kind of funny. Here's a game where the lead dev has said like a million times that his #1 priority is to not allow people to get their smiles from other people's frustration--that he and Lisa would tank the game before they allowed that to be viable. The OP may not be the sharpest tool in the shed ;)
TheDarklord wrote:
We're still looking for good people who want to play good characters, if you know what I mean :)
Dazyk wrote:
DDR3 RAM is pretty cheap right now---getting two more 4GB sticks would be like $65-75 right now. I just don't see how 16 GB of RAM would impact gaming performance vs 8GB.
My girlfriend's new PC isn't a world-beater by any means, but it's decent enough that it shouldn't be painfully slow, sticky/jerking in PFO. It plays other 3D games fine, but for PFO it is just terribad. What's frustrating is that I have updated the drivers and benchmarked the system using 3dMark, and it is performing at similar levels to other systems with the same GPU & CPU. Specs: -Microsoft Windows 8.1 (6.3) 64-bit (Build 9600)
I thought at first that the problem might be the system using the CPU on-board graphics, but I have verified that PFO is using the GT 720, and that the core and memory clocks on the card are doubling during game play. The only things I can think of are, 1) The crappy Dell MB only has a x8 PCI-E slot, and 2) The card only has 1GB of memory. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?
sspitfire1 wrote: Depending on how heavy settlements are recruiting, most new players will likely stick around town for the first few days to a month, even. More importantly, they will have nothing except the clothes on their back and a club. If they want something more than that, they'll need to buy it at the AH at their starter settlement. No, they should join a player settlement. Makes much more sense to develop player towns and interact socially.
You've used formatting to help make hierarchy and chunks more visible to your readers, so they can understand, store and recall all this complex information. That's great--having a high-order category (Managing Characters) visible as a section in bold w/ largest font, and then sub-sections headed in bold with a middle size font, and then entries with italics--all that is great. -You could leverage that further by chunking through white space. At least on my screen, everything has some the same spacing. But having less white space between things-that-go-together, and more white space between things-that--are-apart, you can help users better cognitively "chunk out" the sections, and also find what they are looking for when they skim through. In this document, I would recommend multiple lines between sections, an additional line between sub-sections, and leave entry sequences (e.g. [/i]Training XP, Destiny's Twin[/i] etc.) as is. -You might want to use text boxes to highlight "good to know" stuff. Most of the entries are "These are this, those are that," info. But sometimes you lay out implications, e.g. attack of opportunity for ranged attack, or slotting if you equip two weapons. Boxing that text will help user's recognize there is some good to know stuff to be attentive to. -If you have the time, both a table of contents and a glossary would be helpful.
I think the single most important thing you can do to make this user-friendly is to add screenshots with labels and arrows. For people with prior experience, "Drag Gear from your Inventory to the Paper Doll to equip it. You can equip two one-handed weapons in the primary..." is crystal clear. For a novice, that may be as clear as mud. A screenshot of dragging an item to paper doll, labeled, would immensely leverage the accessibility of document.
A little more testing: -This is not related to server resets. Currently, /vcinvites only last about an hour. -I have been logging in, inviting an alt, checking to make sure the invite shows in the Company GUI, and then logging back in at later times: first 4 hours later, then 1 hour, then 1/2 an hour. -At the 1/2 hour mark the invite still showed, but 1 hour+ the invites disappear. This has all been during the EST day on Sunday, AFTER server maintenance.
So today we put together a little testing group for an hour and a half of client and escalation testing. We had 4-6 players over the course of our playtime, and took on one of the baby escalations--mostly white mobs with occasional yellows, all wolves and hunters. Some observations: -Over that period, we made about a 7% dent in the escalation. So while the mob groups were easier, the process is just as slow as any other escalation. I guess that's working as intended? On a much higher population server I would guess they get whittled down a lot quicker. -All of our progress was from killing mobs. No quests ever popped over the hour and half of killing. Is that working as intended? Regardless of the rate of taking down an escalation, this is just plain boring. -I tried to tank, and made the unfortunate choice to leave Whirlwind on my hotbar, and managed to trigger multiple times. What's interesting is that while no one died, I still managed to lose over 2k reputation. That doesn't sound like a well-implemented mechanic--reputation will likely reflect damage management within parties, not social behavior. -We had Mac and Windows clients in the group. We had one Windows desynch, and the Mac Client would crash about every half hour I would say.
It Doesn't Have to be just monsters... On behalf of Ozem's Vigil, I'd like to invite folks to do some playing and testing, on Sunday, Noon EST, this time a little closer to the middle of the map so not everyone has to run up to the NW corner of the map: we'll meet in the future settlement hex 2 S from Freevale, 1N+1NE from Aragon. I will be on at 1200 EST, and hope to see others there as well.
Ryan:
-I logged on an unaffiliated alt, applied to OV through the GUI, and immediately logged out/logged in my leader character. Brought up the company GUI, and the application was there, and I was able to accept it. Worked as intended. -I logged on an unaffiliated alt, applied to OV through the GUI, and immediately logged out overnight. The next morning (8-9 hours later)I logged in my leader character. Brought up the company GUI, and the application was not there. Not working as intended.
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