Mbando's page

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.

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.

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)
-Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz
-NVIDIA GeForce GT 720 1GB (driver ver. 347.09 WHQL, released 12/23/2014)
-8GB DDR3 RAM
-Direct X11

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?

My account at the GW store shows a credit, however when I try and buy anything, the interface demands I add a credit card. Is this working as intended?

Umm, the Apothecary Trainer shouldn't offer Forestry training, right?

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.

Is there a specific syntax for /vcaccept? People from our settlement are applying, but neither the GUI nor "/vcaccept" shows any applicants. Is it something like "/vcaccept, <name>" or like?

Ozem's Vigil recently hosted "Winter is Coming: Adventure Time in the North" (props to Caldeathe for organizing and leading this). We had a great time, and I had some feedback based on our efforts.

• We had two multi-hour sessions--I wasn't there for all of it, but maybe 6 hours total, with a force from 10-8 players generally geared/leveled out at the top of what Alpha allows. In all of that time, we made a dent in the escalation to 70%. In one hex. That's a lot of effort for a dent in one hex. Does that sound right to you, Dev's? I'm just imagining in EE, by the time we're hitting 3 or 4th level, the entire map is covered by 100% escalations. Maybe there needs to be some tweaking to match escalations to the population/power curve of the server?

• Part of the slowness was (I think) that we had to primarily kill mobs--as we took down most of the mobs in the hex, more mobs, rather than the escalation achievement events, spawned.

• This was my first really social experience in the game, and it was great. It gave me a taste of the kind of shared purpose and effort that makes these games worth playing. This kind of event is an anti-dote to Alpha-fatigue.

• To the best of my understanding, the system only recognizes kills, so as a cleric I had to choose between being rewarded systemically (killing), and playing my role but not being rewarded (healing). That sort of thing isn't helping the game be fun, or encourage role diversity. I think this may also be true for rogues--right now it is hard to see why being a rogue or a cleric isn't "taking one for the team."

• The friendly fire/rep system is unworkable. We figured out pretty early that AoE's were a problem, but somehow even with individual attacks and tab targeting we were regularly attacking each other. A couple people hit -7k rep in less than an hour. That's fine for Alpha, but is absolutely unacceptable for MVP. I applaud all the thought and effort that has gone into a meaningful reputation system, but if the implementation produces the exact opposite intended effect--punishing pro-social cooperative play--you've got a deal-breaker on your hands. If that's in EE, it's a good reason to quit on PFO as a project.

• Healing is pretty darn difficult. Besides being pretty wimpy, you have to run around to find people and stand right next to them, in a very visually confusing, choppy environment. That may be working as intended, but it doesn't feel fun to me. There has to be something in between WoW style F1-F6 clicking while standing still, and running around lost trying to find someone while your video stutters because of the amount of mobs/characters on screen.

• We got our first taste of developing tactics, using a countdown followed by AoE blasts, archer engagement, and melee. Primitive, but fun and pointing towards eventual richness in combat at the group level.

• There was a really enjoyable meta-game aspect to having a bunch of people on Mumble jabbering away. Thod has a truly charming German accent, his son an equally charming but different UK accent I couldn't quite place, Cal practically spit Maple syrup as he talked, there were US regional variations aplenty, etc. It was cool to interact verbally in real time with folks from the forums. Again, this social aspect is a huge part of what makes MMOs worth the time and effort, and I got a taste of that.
  

I know there are a lot of things (like server stability) that are at the tippity-top of the development list right now. But as we look at the bigger picture, can you good folks at GW give us any kind of scale for thinking about development of PvE beyond escalations? Things like dungeons--if you all remember the "PFO Environment Experience," something like a dungeon to explore once in a while would really be awesome. Not any scripted boss fights or anything, just something more than mobs standing in a circle outside.

Is this a first 3-6mon kind of thing? 1 year+?

As I and other players from Ozem's Vigil try and think through our EE characters, we've become aware of the fundamental tension between the avowed design philosophy and game mechanics for building your character.

I feel like we're in a kind of a bind. The design seems to be: "Make a hard choice. This game is different than other games, where additional roles (gatherer, crafter) are added as timesinks to combat content consumption. Insted in PFO, those timesinks are career paths, and you can dabble in some, or be really good at one."

But the mechanic seems to be: "Look, unlike other games, you can't just follow the path you want. We're forcing you to make this hard choice about putting character power into things that are irrelevant to your playstyle if you want to be very good at something--if you want to be an adventurer, we're forcing you to put scarce character power into side ventures like crafting and gathering, but because of the design there will be no return on investment--it's just a power sink to make your time in the game longer."

As we understand it, it's a kind of lose-lose proposition, where we are forced to make a hard choice both ways, and get the worst of both worlds. I'm puzzled by this. Am I missing something, or misunderstood the system?

Could some folks share illustrative examples of keywords they have active, e.g. "I have feat X & Y trained, and am wearing armor with Keywords X, Y, P, and D. So I'm going to try and get feats P & D also."

Be great to get some martial, divine, arcane and rogue examples.

Is there any kind of timetable for optimizing the client? It works fine on my newly built rig, but I was sorely disappointed when I my gf tried to run it. She has a laptop with:
-Core i7 CPU
-4 MB of DDR3 RAM
-Nvidia GeForce GT650M w/ .5GB RAM
-Win7 32-bit w/ bcdedit to increase RAM reserve

That's an awfully modest system, but I was surprised that the client was unplayable on it. She could log in, but the lag was so bad there was no way you could do anything in the game world. Hoping the client will be optimized at some point so people with older systems can play.

(Posting here under the assumption that we are still not using the Alpha Forums)

One of my CC members can't play the game--on a Win7 system, after patching, and then logging in to hit "Enter World" after the textures and what-not loads, he crashes to desktop with no error message. What's freaky about this is that he has built a new, $1200 system, and the exact same behavior is being exhibited.

I'm a little hamstrung in trying to help him, in that I'm remote, but since he's not the saviest computer guy I'm going to have to.

System: Win 7, GeForce GTX 760 card w/ 2GB, i5 on an MSI Z97 board

1. Anyone else experiencing this behavior?
2. Any suggestions for how to trouble shoot this? It's a brand new system, fresh Win7 install, all updates run, nice new card with updated drivers from NVidia, and the only other things installed are Windows Security Essentials and Steam.

Not quite as good as having the Alpha stress test, but this may be of some small interest to our military members, and those who have close relationships with members. Older posters here may remember that my research involves military behavioral health, and that I have a particular concern with military resilience.

This article in Armed Forces & Society springs from extensive empirical research among US Marines, mostly the drill instructors and officers who train and screen new Marines. If you skip to page 7, you can get to the interesting parts: the interviews with Marines where they explain how they cope (and fail to cope) with stress and distress in combat, but also after combat and at home.

1) I do think the economy loop from adventuring/gathering to crafting is fun and engaging, and gives groups of players a purpose. I think if you can make that part of the game a little smoother, you'll get folks to pay for subscriptions while the rest goes in. Finding recipes was cool, and meaningful. Being able to craft something for your friends is meaningful.

2) That being said, combat animations/sounds/feel is so clunky I am kind of worried. I'm more about gameplay than graphics, but I'm worried about my guildies who are currently launching in Archaeage. I don't think that game will solve the gameplay and design problems that PFO is meant to get around, but the gap in graphics is so enormous that I worry my friends will be like "Holy crap this is 16-bit--no way."

3) Tooltips, but you know that.

4) Maps. Wow are the maps…not useful. The large map is muddy, indistinct, and difficult to relate to the world you see in the client. It looks like someone blew up a really low-res top down screenshot of the world, and I hate it. I hate the mini-map slightly less, but only slightly.

5) Related to the above: please make it easier to find you party. "Hey, since none of us can see each other on the map, and the map is so indistinct and is unlabeled, let's all try and go to the hex that is three hexes east of, and up one from Sotterhill, at the southern tip of that hex, where it looks like there is a road going into the hex." How about some arrows and stuff so we can find each other? It really lowers the social engagement of the game.

6) Please let me arrange my hotbar buttons: I am sick of healing healing monsters by accident. I udnerstand that there is some sort of rationale between the three slots on the left vs. the ones on the right, but it means that I have hostile/friendly stuff mixed, when I would like to widely separate them.

7) Reputation: do we really want it to be that easy to lose that easily by accident in your party? In the middle of combat with some ogres, I somehow (I think it was mouse-look) targeted a party member, hit him like 8 times (combat animation is bad I had no idea what was happening), and suddenly I'm a murderhobo with -4060 reputation, and I only knew because my friend pointed it out. A system where you can effortlessly, instantly engage the harshest penalties by accident, without being aware of it, sounds like a bad system to me. But I'm prolly just crazy like that.

What advancement path would you recommend for someone who wants to be a Paladin when they come available?

To the best of my understanding, settlement and character alignment can't include TN, because that circumvents the 1-step alignment rule. Is that still accurate?

Can you give us a sense of realistic minimum numbers to be viable in EE? Is there a rough number you could give us, a "floor" to shoot for? Let's say it's the last week before the end of the Landrush, and Settlement A has 50 people, Settlement B has 25, and Settlement C has 12. Would you look at any of these settlements and say to yourself, "These folks are kidding themselves"?

While I appreciate all the general insights and first impressions, I'm most interested in how PFO is meaningfully distinct from prior MMOs. A lot of us have run around in EQ2/WOW/RIFT/Warhammer, etc.

What stands out to you as a genuinely distinct about PFO's approach?

In another thread, one of our more vocal self-proclaimed leaders was referencing their vast PvP experience, and I was struck but the high levels of "Me" language in their posts (I, me, my, etc.) Many of us are former/current military members, and know that "me" people aren't leaders--a large part of leadership is selflessness and focus on others. It's why military socialization includes punishing over-use of both "Me" language and "Me" conduct.

This points to something critical that most people complaining about the Towers mechanic are missing: while the mechanic does favor numbers, numbers are very hard. The larger any political unit, the more/more difficult political problems become, and the more critical leadership, a scarce commodity, becomes. The real limit on mega-settlements is the very low probability of an on-line Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, etc. appearing. I think it's more likely we'll find that there's a tension between leadership desire/availability and leadership skills and virtues. The best leaders among us may have lots of fish to fry in the RL, and while they might be very committed to the game as a hobby or outlet, they won't be at full on mom's basement level.

At the heart of political problems is seemingly distinct, often contradictory needs in the group, the very sort of thing GW is deliberately forcing on is (e.g. 2/3rds of us want a combat role template, while 1/3 of us want a craft template). It is very difficult to come up with creative political solutions to these sorts of problems, and the complexity and number of political problems increases with the size of the polity.

If GW truly does force us to make meaningful choices (and I have confidence they will), then that acts as a natural brake to settlement growth, and moves us away from a scenario where there are two giant factions fighting each other, and into one where there are many factions, each carefully trying to simultaneously juggle the needs of their own polity and the complex dance of shifting alliances and relationships between factions.

"I've brought Elfstar to become a priestess and a witch."

We are sharing this with the rest of the community because we believe in transparency and wish to invite others that are interested in exploring the advantages of being in a Lawful Good settlement to check us out as a possible home.

Ozem's Vigil

Core Values: We treat everyone with respect and the dignity endowed in being human. That means:
Providing a socially safe game space for playing Pathfinder Online, e.g.:

• Not using slurs in reference to others
  
• Not using sexualizing or objectifying language
  
• Disrespecting others is something we won’t tolerate, and is grounds for dismissal from the settlement.

• No scamming or griefing.
  
• No duping or exploits
  
• Honor contracts and treaties.

• Support an active crafting division.
  
• Build trade and friendly relations with other settlements.
  
• Project force to maintain lawful, pro-social game play.
  
• Grow our settlement and support companies as they claim surrounding POIs.
  
• Achieve diversity in POI's—we want to support shrines (including other good Gods e.g. to Sarenrae), Taverns, Watchtowers, and Manors.

• Each company has a seat on the Council of Companies, and each company leader has a designated deputy—their "hand" to fill in if the leader is unavailable.
  
• Power sharing and leadership will be dynamic: New companies may join the settlement and take a seat on the Council of Companies. That is a big enough step that it would be a unanimous decision from the current companies.
  
• Settlement members who don't belong to a company are just as important, and will elect a mayor. The Mayor has a permanent advisory seat on the Council of Companies. In the event of an odd number of companies on the council, the mayor has a tie-breaking vote.

• Town halls meetings
  
• Talks with interest groups (e.g. crafters, traders)
  
• Directly asking members for feedback on policy
  
• Open door policy: settlement members are encouraged to proactively share input with Council members.

If you look at the Landrush map, you can see partial hexes, for example on the north edge of the map there are half hexes shown--what will they be like in game?

We're very pleased to see several new names at Ozem's Vigil, and we'd love to get to know you better :) If you've recently (in the last week) joined, please either post below or shoot myself, FMS Quietus, or Khas of Fidelis a PM so we can connect your name on the roster to you.

Is there a way to contact people who have joined your settlement as part of the Landrush, or push out communication to the roster? I'm trying to figure out how to open up communication with people who have joined as part of the Landrush, but that we don't know from prior contact.

GW has a serious rhetorical challenge facing it: to general gaming public, this game is a murder simulator, and most of the people this game would appeal to don't want a murder simulator. It's a miscommunication, compounded by some rhetorical mistakes GW is making (understandable ones, and ones that can be fixed), and the ongoing discourse at gaming sites.

I had an intuitive sense of this problem, and so I conducted a corpus linguistics analysis of editorial and user comments at sites like Massively and MMORPG.com. What I found was that people are extremely negative about the game, are very certain about their arguments, and express uncertainty about the future success of the game, specifically:

-Statistically significant levels of emotional "negativity" language (words and phrases English speakers use to refer to very negative outcomes, e.g. rape, murder, suicide, mistreatment) along with an absence of positive emotion language.

-Significantly lower levels of positive values langauge

-High levels of combined oppositional reasoning, confidence and intensity (e.g. commenters arguing back about how bad PFO will be, and using high levels of certainty/modals w/ intensifiers as they argue)

-High levels of uncertainty and future projection (e..g expressing a lot of doubt about the future of the game).

This is what Joe the Gamer thinks about PFO, and and passes on to other gamers in a self-reinforcing discourse:

If you change the design to something that everyone can enjoy, something that fits the Pathfinder style, I will gladly support it. Right now, though, you're making a modern recreation of Ultima Online that rewards griefers and gank-squads instead of honest players. I've discussed the game with dozens of fans of both pen and paper and MMO titles, and I have yet to have one of them who thought that what you are making would be entertaining, or that it was at all a match for the kind of community thinking that made Paizo and Pathfinder so wonderful. I'm very afraid that you're making a mistake, one that will sully the Pathfinder name to much of your potential new audience

What I want to highlight Ryan is that you can get more subscribers and better press if you change some of GW's talk, and directly counter the core issues of controversy. Think about this:

You said that people will come to PFO with major misconceptions, including that "Open World PvP implies a murder simulator," and I 100% agree with you--that's what the phrase means in usage. Guess what GW has on it's "About PFO?" page--one of the blurbs is "Open World Pvp." We know that GW is not advertising a Murder Simulator, and people that take a chance on the game will see it is not, but to the larger public, you are advertising the production of a innovative, high quality murder simulator.

I think there are a number of possible rhetorical moves you could make to disrupt and reshape the current public gaming discourse, but the first step in that is seeing that instead of crafting a message for your interior audience--the already converted--you need to craft effective messaging for a different, larger audience that has money and wants an amazing game.

*Nerd Notes*: This was a pretty down and dirty corpus from the most obvious MMO sites, looking for editorial/feature pieces on PFO, and the reader comments (I stripped Ryan and my counter-arguments to better capture the talk of the uninitiated). I used DocuScope, a corpus linguistics tool that uses a pragmatics approach (more concerned with human ends and goals in language than with semantic meaning), and is particularly reliable at detecting sociocultural parts of talk, like emotion, attitudes, values, argument, and stance. I used a two-way ANOVA Tukey's test, comparing the PFO comments corpus to a general reference corpus of English (FROWN Corpus of 1990s English) as a benchmark.

Yo yo yo check it out!!

https://goblinworks.com/landrush/

I still have CC embers who are waiting on GW support to manually fix the Paizo to GW account migration, but the land rush vote happens tomorrow. It would be a real bummer to be lower in draft order because of mechanical problems on the back-end. Is there anyway to manually add in votes, or retroactively add them once GW fixes the problem?

Stephen, Lee, Ryan,

can you share any thoughts on what kinds of abilities will be tied to alignment? Pretty sure Paladin abilities will be, guessing assassination and necromantic skills will be as well. Will druidic training be tied to a neutral alignment, and how would that play out with settlements? Appreciate anything you could share.

What makes for effective, durable online social structures? How do we create guilds, settlements, and larger structures that don’t fall apart? While most of us long-time gamers likely have some ideas from experience, there may be value in extrapolating from the scientific literature on military resilience and readiness, at the unit level. Real life military social structures are different in some very important ways from online social structures (life-threat being the most obvious), but thinking through what coordinated, cohesive groups handle adversity and grow, and what supports their readiness and effectiveness may help us think through and implement best practices for our guilds and settlements.

My review of the literature shows the following unit level factors:

Resilience:

· Pro-social behavior and teamwork

· Communication and problem-solving skills and habits

· Cohesion [both affective cohesion (high levels of mutual social support, comradeship love), and instrumental cohesion (committed to the group's goals and tasks]

· Unit leadership and positive command climate (leader competency,

Readiness:

· Personal/Family well-being (gives you space to commit to and focus on unit tasks)

· Cohesion

· Confidence (both self-confidence and confidence in each other)

· Unit leadership and positive command climate

· Shared ethos (group agreement on values and ethics)

Some thoughts:

· There’s significant overlap of factors that support resilience and readiness. That’s a goods thing, and can us a sense of where we might profitably “double-dip” in building and maintaining our social structures.

· Communication & problem-solving skills: While this factor draws heavily from the skill-set of members, this is a trainable set of skills/habits. Leaders and members can make an explicit choice to talk through problems, to use both directness and politeness to avoid toxic behavior (e.g. passive aggressive behavior), bring problems out to be explicitly addressed. When you see a communication failure or social problem, don’t let it go and hope it goes away—address it.

· Cohesion: there’s a lot of research on the positive side of cohesion: hard work and shared sacrifice in service to group goals builds cohesion. Some of my field research points to the darker side of cohesion: negative appraisals and group judgments can be a powerful incentive for members to change behaviors*. If someone acts selfishly, group condemnation of the behavior is necessary, but the member must be allowed a way to redeem/recover their standing in the group.

· Leadership. In the literature, in addition to leader competence, leader concern for the welfare of members has been a strong predictor of resilience and readiness. Effective leaders are able to place group goals as the highest good while demonstrating concern and care for members.

· Pro-social/helping behavior: This is a serious challenge in MMO’s because of mechanics. Level gaps and game-play dispersion(PVE, PVP, Gear/Faction grinding) tend to pull teams apart—helping a guildie may often mean hurting yourself (in terms of time sinks). PFO’s design may help ameliorate this—there’s no grind, so I don’t need to worry about stopping my grind to help someone else do their grind; and regardless of your playstyle, it will have to be integrated into SS vs. SS play—you can’t opt out.

· Shared ethos: You had better think long and hard about how you merge groups, because if you merge to get numbers, but you have a serious gap in terms of values, you’ve got a huge fault line just waiting for a blow to shatter you back into pieces.

*Please see Marcellino, William (2104). “Talk Like a Marine: USMC linguistic acculturation and civil–military argument.” Discourse Studies 16, no. 3. Also see: Marcellino, W. & F. Tortorello (in press), “I Don’t Think I Would Have Recovered: Resilience Among U.S. Marines.” Armed Forces & Society.

Ryan,

is there any sense of when we might have boards at Goblinworkscom? Thanks.

I recently saw a video from the Alpha of Rust that perfectly illustrates the fecklessness of the constant murder/robbery sim lobbying here. Everytime you're like "Oh, here's my thread arguing why bandits should GAIN rep for murder/robbery," or "Oh haha Green Hat Thursday Murder events are really just RP," that video is what you're really lobbying for.

The next time you feel the urge to bleat out some nonsense about how PFO is restricting your ability to play a meaningful character because you can't SAD a merchant AND kill them AND get a reputation boost + murder people with green hats (or pants, it's all the same), watch that video again, and remind yourself what you're actually asking for.

Or better yet, go play Rust instead of PFO--you'd fit perfectly in that brotherhood.

Some of the people in my gaming guild are with child to be involved in the game, and are salivating at the chance that GW opens up pledges again for EE. Do we know how many slots are filled?

I added up the numbers at the KS page and got 8,992 filled pledges at various EE levels--does that sound right? And that's out of 22,200 total EE slots over 6 months?

[OMG I am so bitter the Paizoforums ate this thread yesterday]

I just built my new gaming rig in anticipation of PFO, and as I was doing some benchmark/tweaking it occurred to me, "Hey, we don' have PFO right now, but we do have Unity games that might be comparable!" I've been playing a pretty fun sandbox zombie survival game lately State of Decay. It's a third person shooter/survival game that is basically like a more realistic version of The Walking Dead: you desperately try to find shelter, other survivors, scavenge for food, etc., but unlike TWD when you do something stupid you die and there's permadeath.

Just because this is a Unity game doesn't mean it's comparable to PFO, in that (as I understand it), GW will be making tradeoff decisions about how many polygons, materials, bones, etc. to put in. But as this game involves combat between human figures, landscapes, interiors, a single large geographic area (no loadable zones), I think it's a useful data point.

On my old Core2Duo rig, even at mid-level graphics settings the game stuttered a lot during fights or when I was driving around fast and bringing in new views to be rendered. How would it play on my luscious new system?

Specs
MSI Z87-G45 Gaming LGA 1150 Motherboard
MSI N660-2GD5/OC GeForce GTX 660 2GB 192-bit GDDR5 Graphics Card
Intel Core i5-4430 Haswell CPU @ 3.0GHz
Ripsaw 4 GB DDR3 1600 Memory
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1

For the test, I set State of Decay to full HD resolution (1920x1080), settings on "Ultra," and left VSync* on. Basically the game played super smooth and looked nice when I was sighting in on the landscape, and stayed pegged at 60 fps even when I was running over zombies. It was a huge improvement in performance and gameplay upgrading from a 5 year old system.

Just fun fun I turned Vsync off, and depending on what I was doing ranged from 60-80 fps, with no noticeable tearing. I also played around with BioShock Infinite at Ultra settings (ranging from 30 fps to 90 fps depending on what was happening on screen). However, BioShock uses the Unreal Engine 3, and so it's not so comparable I think.

Anyone else have a Unity game that might be useful to test against?

*VSync caps your graphics card's fps at the refresh speed of your monitor, so you don't get "tearing" where different parts of the scene are rendered from different angles. Basically if you have a 60Hz monitor, your FPS will be capped at 60 fps.

Ryan's made a pretty interesting offer: for us to crowdforge truly immersive, innovative RP support. I buy his claim that we've been playing impoverished, "Kill [X] [MobID]" games--deserts where a /chairsit animation seemed meaningful for helping us play our roles.

The point isn't so much that sitting in a chair is wrong or bad, but rather given all the resources dedicated to a /chairsit, why not shoot higher? Why not cast off the shackles of EQ/EQ2/WOW/Whatever and really explore the space?

So if the devs are going to devote resources to making this really a role playing game, what would it be? We'll have to bear in mind that there are technical limits, also the "wouldn't it be cool" principle (i.e. would it still be cool if everyone does it?), but we can think big now, brainstorm, and than do work paring back to what's doable and presents the bet bang for the buck.

Is anyone else playing with the Alpha release of Shroud of the Avatar? I'm interested in the project as part of my general interest in solving the Theme Park problem. EQNext is trying to build one kind of sandbox/procedural innovation in gaming, PFO has a PvP sandbox w/ Theme Park element (the most coherent and plausible in my mind). And then SotA has this idea of selective multiplay.

It's kind of weird, but essentially you can play "online" single player, but more importantly "Friends Only Online," and "Open Multiplayer Online." In FOO you play with friends/guildies only, and it's basically a PvE sandbox. In OMP they have some kind of matching algorithm so that instead of a server's worth of players, the server only shows you "relevant" players, e.g. friends, people you've interacted with in conversation or trade, and "others" you may be interested in (which I think means potential PvP players).

I'm suspect of this--I think it sounds like Trammel Opt-Out, and I'm struggling to see how I can build up meaningful relationships prior to the algorith showing me who should be relevant.

Way back in January,

@Danneth Sky - There is no good reason to play a chaotic evil character except if you like being other people's content.

I think the strongest opposition that Lawful Good Settlements will face will come from Lawful Evil Settlements.

I think that many players will find that their choices often funnel them towards Chaotic Good social structures, thus those communities will often be the largest, most diverse, and most active.

I see most of the "neutral" positions on the alignment grid as either a delicate balancing point that you have to work hard to maintain so that you can be a bridge between other, larger social structures, or a temporary waypoint as your character's actions pull them towards one of the four corners.

RyanD

Ryan has also said that LG will have strong mechanical disadvantages due to the temptation to use force, and that he expects there to be a active funnel ride to the garbage heap of CE-suckage.

So the model is that you mostly end up in social structures in one of the four corners: the majority of anti-social players in the CE-suck, the overall majority of players reasonably social but very force of arms-centric in CG, and then a minority in mechanically powerful but socially difficult LG. Not exactly sure about the LE corner.

Some questions for Ryan or Stephen:
1) Is that still your vision?
2) What about LE, will they have any drawbacks comparable to LG, or will LE be a pretty large/easy to maintain alignment?
3) Would POIs be a likely spot for LG or other specialty alignments? It sounds like maintaining a LG alignment would be easier for smaller social structures, so maybe a CC of LG characters might run a security POI (Watchtower or Manor) for a CG settlement.

Thanks.

For those folks who aren't as computer tech savvy but are interested in upgrading your comp or getting a new one in anticipation of PFO, a short intro to what's relevant, mostly PCs, with a short section on Macs:

Video card: The GPU (graphics chip) has the biggest impact on game performance. They come in two flavors:
-GeForce cards designed by NVIDIA. They range in performance (and cost) from the GeForce GTX 500-GTX 700 series, and are topped by the new GeForce TITAN card.
-Radeon cards designed by ATI, ranging from the Radeon HD 4000-7000 series

Both kind of cards work well, and both support technology to chain multiple cards together (kind of like having 2 or 3 engines in your race car): SLI for NVIDIA, and Crossfire for ATI. Both require motherboards that support that technology.

In addition to the GPU, VRAM memory is important, both the amount and to a lesser degree the speed. Essentially more/faster is better, and a card with a GPU one step down, but with robust memory, might be faster (and more expensive) than a step up in GPU on a cheap card.

Both kinds of cards need a modern motherboard with a kind of connector called a PCI Express x 16 bus (PCIex16). Both cards draw significant power from the system, so you need to make sure you have an adequate power supply. For GeForce-based cards, 450-500 watts will likely work, but for the top end TITAN card, you'd need 650W (you can look up power requirements on NVIDIA's website). If you run multiple cards in SLI/Crossfire mode, power consumption goes way up (and you may have cooling problems ).

Bear in mind that if you buy an off the shelf computer, or have a custom rig built at a place like Cyberpower or Falcon Northwest, all the parts will be compatible. If you want to upgrade/build, you will need to make sure you have the right motherboard and powersupply, sufficient space for the card itself, and sufficient cooling, to successfully upgrade.

Laptop video cards: similar deal: Radeon HD and NVIDIA GeForce cards, except there is an "m" after the number to denote "mobile," e.g. GeForce GTX 780m, which is the fastest single mobile card. Be advised that you must have a "discrete" video card in your laptop if you want to play this game—"integrated" chips won't work. The possible exception to this is the brand new Intel Iris Pro 5200 chip. It is comparable to a GeForce GTX 650M, and based on performance with today's games (e.g. Skyrim), I would speculate will work for PFO. You can play Skyrim at low graphics settings and get a high framerate with an Iris Pro or a GTX 650M, but not play it (usably) at Ultra settings. So I'm guessing that GW is unlikely to release a bleeding edge graphics game, and so I'm setting up the GTX 650M as a bottom level acceptable chip.

For more on laptop graphics performance, see this useful chart.

CPUs: Again, it's a binary choice, in this case between Intel and AMD. There is more to choosing a CPU than just the processor model (the speed and onboard cache also impact performance greatly), so take this as a starting overview:
-Intel chips come in i3, i5, and i7 varieties. Basically, the i7 chips don't offer much of a boost to game performance—my new system is going to be built around an i5 (I would guess an i3 system with a good card would be ok).
Note: if you build an i5 system, bear in mind they come in two flavors: Haswell and Ivy Bridge, that need two different kinds of motherboard sockets (socket 1155 and 1150, respectively).
-AMD chips come in FX 4000-9000 series, with higher numbers more powerful and more expensive. I only build Intel rigs so I can't say much about the relative merits of the different series. I can say though that both Intel and AMD make good chips and that you can do fine with either.

System Memory (RAM) It's cheap these days, and more is better, so I think it makes sense to get 4 MB RAM if you are running a 32-bit version of Windows 7, or 8 GB if you are running a 64-bit OS. Currently DDR (Double Data Rate)3 is the best, but DDR4 should be out soon. Faster memory can help, but the important thing is to have a lot, enough to avoid your memory having to swap info between RAM and virtual RAM on your HD (that would slow things down considerably). As a reference point, I'm running a 64-bit Windows 7 OS but I have a measly 2 GB RAM, and when I recently participated in a beta test of a new AAA game, my hard drive was running constantly as a swap file, making up for the limited RAM.

For Mac Users
It's a lot more straightforward, since Macs (especially the iMac and notebooks) aren't as amenable to upgrades. Again, this is based on my assumptions that GW isn't going to put out something that's needs bleeding edge technology, and that systems that play current 3d games well now will likely work for PFO. Given that, I would guess the following CURRENT Macs would work:
-15" MacBook Pro w/ Retina Display, with the GTX 750m option a much better choice than the Iris Pro.
-Both the 21.5" and 27" iMacs, with the 27" optional upgrades to GeForce GT and GTX cards a much better choice.

I'm just a hobbyist who likes to make his own rigs--I'm sure there are folks here who vastly surpass my knowledge, so please chime in with revisions or additions.

I'm really excited after reading Stephen's comments on the variability of builds for mages. It ties in with Nihimon's frequent request that divination spells be implemented, that it's not just about casting fireball+magic missile all day.

I hope Nihimon can, and does, make his own quirky spell caster who specializes in casting the other spells, e.g. not chain-casting evocation DD spells. He would specialize only in casting spells that others fail to see have incredible utility potential. Like, we'd show up at a dungeon, the rogue would sneak back to us and be like "I saw four goblins up ahead, and this one huge goblinoid--some kind of orc I think--around a dying campfire. I think we can ambush them." And then Nihimon is like "Great! I brought my adventuring spellbook, with great utility spells like Mend, Decompose Corpse, and...wait for it...Youthful Appearance!" And we would all just stare at him, and be like "WTF man!?" And he would be like "Don't you see? I'll make myself look like a tailor who is also a baby, or maybe a toddler, and mend their loinclouts, lulling them into a false sense of security. Then later, after you've killed them, I'll strip the meat off their bones through my arcane powers, totally freaking out any goblins who come by later and find gleaming skeletons with perfectly mended loinclouts." And my paladin will be like, "I'm going to choke the life out of you right now, and become an anti-paladin dedicated to whatever friggin' diabolical force owns the portfolio of making mages pick damage-producing spells..."

So, what other spells do you folks think Nihimon is likely to keep in his special "Adventuring" spellbook?

On behalf of Peace Through Vigilance, I want to offer a happy and martial 238th birthday wish to the United States Marine Corps, all Marines current and former, and all US Navy medical personnel who have served with Marines.

PTV draws its inspiration from the ideal Marines aspire to in terms of soldierly virtue, and the knowledge that there is "No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy" than a US Marine.

Oorah Marines! Here's to the US Marine Corps, and 238 years of service to the nation!

I'd like to respectfully ask the Dev Team what the rationale is for not having a website for PFO. I in no way mean to disparage Paizo's hospitality. It just seems strange to me that within this sandbox market, which is getting a little more crowded, GW is doing an excellent job marketing at conferences and in interviews, but doesn't have a visible web presence. You've got FB, the blog, but where is our site: forums, FAQ, media section, etc?

I wouldn't be surprised if you have some awesome plan/reason/rationale, because it looks like most of what you cats do is pretty well thought out. I'd be grateful though if you could unpack this a bit for me--kind of a headscratcher.

Very interesting conversation from these guys on the pitfalls of charging a subscription: http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/08/23/game-scoop-did-elder-scrolls-online-ju st-commit-suicide

They get all the reasons why that can be a mistake, mention EVE, but skip right over why folks are paying in EVE.

As details emerge about EQNext, I'm fascinated by complementary but distinct conceptual approaches to fixing the current broken model for MMO development.

John Smedley said this about EQNext, clearly channeling Ryan

What we are building is something that we will be very proud to call EverQuest. It will be the largest sandbox-style MMO ever designed. The same exciting content delivered in a new way. Something you've never seen before. The MMO world has never seen before. We didn't want more kill 10 rats quests. We didn't want more of the same. If you look at the MMOs out there, they're delivering the same content over and over again. So are we. We need to change that. When we released EverQuest, we changed the world. We want to do that again with a different type of game.

But his path (along with Brad McQuaid) to this end is almost diametrically opposed to GW's.

In a very abbreviated nutshell, the PFO approach to the problem of canned content and the new content creation cycle is to have the players' interactions be the content, an essentially PvP approach (although it includes PvE elements).

The EQnext approach is using computational advances to replace human labor in creating new content, in this case through dynamic procedural terrain generation and dynamic AI ecologies, through StoryBricks and Voxel Farms.

I can see both approaches being viable, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

If you are planning on participating in the PFO Community exercise in Darkfall Unholy Wars, please post your character's name, race, and class below.

I've been playing the Neverwinter open beta lately just to pass the time, and that got me thinking about how GW plans to handle rollbacks.

Neverwinter is in open beta, with the cash shop open, and no wipes. So I'm not really sure what "beta" means in this case--the game is pretty much out, just in a state of regular hotfixes. There was recently a huge farming exploit--basically one of the Guardian class' abilities did millions of points of damage, and could 1-3 shot boss mobs. So of course a bunch of people just farmed the heck out of the the most difficult dungeons, creating a huge economic skew.

But you can't rollback, because people are paying for stuff with real money. I've mostly played subscription games before, so I'm not sure how this is best handled.

What happens if we're in EE, people are paying for micro-transactions, and something big goes wrong in the economy?

I know from the boards and PMs that there are a lot of military/former military members and family here. This thread on the Marine Resilience Research Project may be of interest to some.

My co-investigator and I, Dr. Frank Tortorello, recently completed a research project for the Marine Corps on resilience--how Marines understand and live out stress and resilience.

We were invited to write summary article on it as guest columnists for Tom Ricks defense blog at Foreign Policy magazine. It may be of interest to military members/family of military members:

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/21/military_resilience_suicide _and_post_traumatic_stress_whats_behind_it_all

Note: you have to register your email at FP, but you do NOT have to pay for a subscription.

Illiyendier and I just got our badges for GenCon (Aug. 15-18) in Indy. Who else is going?

Some of you may have already seen this, but Lord British himself is back, with a kickstarter for a project that sounds like a PFOish Ultima Online project.

The Kickstarter is super vague, but what details there are sound a lot like what Ryan has articulated in the "meaningful interaction" vs. "theme park grinding" approaches to games. But it sounds different too, in that they promise "meaningful pvp that minimizes griefing," but also some sort of instancing system for adventuring--those seem to be at cross purposes.

So is this the first competition for PFO's niche Ryan mentioned would come? Can they make their ambition December 2013 Alpha release date? Be interesting to see happens.

The Dev team has spent a lot of time explaining in detail the constraints and barriers to PvP: the flag system, the curse system, bounties, and GM appeals are all deterrent systems, and point to GW's commitment to restraining PvP.

Given that this is a PvP game, I'd like to ask that an upcoming blog go into the same level of detail for how we CAN engage in PvP.