Merkaile's page

This entire thread is somewhat humorous to me. I'm not being insulting in that, I'll explain below:

There are still some avid PvP players in Golgotha but I know a portion of the very avid PvPers aren't playing PFO. We've set our sights on another game. When we interact on this different game's forums some of our most "hardcore" are called carebears/squishycore. I'd hate to see what this thread would look like if those players labeling us carebears were here playing PFO.

I guess it's like a European looking over at the US at our "liberals" and "conservatives" arguing and saying "You all look hard right to me."

I love PvP. I don't feel PFO offers anything remotely approaching meaningful PvP so my desire to log in is zero. However, if you want the PvP systems to work they have to be tested.

I'll start by saying I very rarely initiate PvP. I don't attack random people while off on my own and I don't kill people that are AFK. That being said I think this game seriously lacks a sense of danger. People are AFKing all over the place. If I go AFK due to something RL I have no right to come back and expect to be alive.

The war of towers is dull. I've scouted and sat outside towers to guard them and no one shows up. We attack towers and no one shows up to defend. Like so many have said there's really no point in defending when you can just take another. Seeking out PvP with the towers more often just ends in boredom.

This is a game where PvP is supposedly a major pillar. It's free for all enabled with the obvious consequence of losing reputation. When it log in I acknowledge that. To be surprised that someone attacks me at all or at any time strikes me as...well the internet is old now. There shouldn't be any surprises.

Oh come on. You know it's a mud wrestling ring. Sentients all think of one thing.

It would be nice to have a statistic skew of the total numbers to account for spies!

Yeah a lot of us Golgothans had headed off to sleep, disappointed at having experienced PvT instead of PvP. Our leader was feeding our location to those whose towers were being taken.

Yeah there seems to be a lot of really personal feelings involved in this. Slammy may very well pay more attention to things than I do but I'll be honest I don't normally pay that much attention to my buff/debuff icons in the heat of battle so much that I'd know in a fight that I wasn't provoking opportunity. I know what effects I'm under through deduction by looking at the abilities thrown my way by others and by their more obvious effects on my character (ie a slow). I say that knowing that while I'm not the greatest of PvPers I'm at least halfway competent.

A little background: before this all blew up we were discussing this in TS. The comments about Slammy being abnormally hard to target had people looking at the video to determine why and saying yeah it looked like he was not provoking opportunity and perhaps he had de synced. I know I've had the spell desync hit me even while not at a hex boundary. It happens when I'm traveling and spamming my speed boost. Slammy hadn't noticed it; another player had while watching the video. Slammy's a pretty good actor if he'd been aware of it and was exploiting it prior to being called out for being hard to target.

I hope this issue can be resolved quickly for the betterment of all!

While I'm not necessarily opposed to a way to easily identify more aggressive players and griefers, this seems like a lot of work. If the game takes off and the player base gets larger, then this will become unwieldy very fast.

The points do go down with another force within, but in my opinion whoever has the most living people within the tower should be the one gaining points.

Golgotha probably shouldn't have taken the tower we did last night as we were pretty outnumbered from what I could tell. Like Phyllain said we just repeatedly ran in from not far away when we died.

Actually the comment wasn't about a lack of customization, it was about a lack of nameplates. I want names and company affiliation hovering over people's heads. I know there's not a lot of support for that but it's something I throw my full support behind.

Last night was fun but also very frustrating. The lag within the game for me was pretty terrible and I have a fairly powerful machine (3 gb video and 12 gb memory). The lag got progressively worse until the game basically became a slideshow for me. I had to restart the game in order to respawn after death before the end. I could target people but attacks weren't launching.

I won't beat the targeting dead horse too much but it needs work. I'd like an option for nameplates as well. There aren't really enough character or armor customizations in the game, in my opinion, that having to use target recognition is a valid defense of not having nameplates. Names also don't appear for a target until much too close, again in my opinion.

It looks to me like legit PvP happened. Sounds like it was fun!

It's interesting people were upset about this, with no real consequences to be had other than a rep hit. Had someone done this to us, I'd have been laughing my rear off while enjoying the fun.

I was pretty sad that most of our rep in the Golgothan force was too tanked to really give a true response to the revenge attack. I couldn't respond due to wanting to be able to actually get back into my settlement (I was below -2500). It would have been interesting to see the result. The one person that attacked me while I was in stealth would have died horribly, even after me letting him get two free shots, if his five friends hadn't shown up to help. Not saying i'm mad, I enjoyed my subsequent running from the ogre spawn campers!

I think Phyllain's point on the sword was slightly misconstrued in some of the replies. He wasn't coming at it from he himself being an aggressor. I think what he was basically saying is that no group in their right mind will act out against the NAP unless they have a heavy PvP strength and/or welcome the fun/conflict. Anyone who openly acts against it or declares they are not in support will likely see other companies/settlements in their core 6 towers. The attackers may or may not try to keep the towers travel times being what they are.

All that being said I'm neutral myself on the NAP. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

To me PvP is anything with players competing against players. Some of it, to me, is extremely boring; auction house games I'm looking at you. The combat portion of PvP is what I enjoy. That being said it is very rare for me to initiate combat. I will attack someone attacking a settlement or guild member/friend without hesitation. If I'm walking around and see someone flagged I don't attack unless they make a threatening move. Am I potentially giving them an advantage? Probably but my win/loss ratio is pretty high so I'm giving them a helping hand. I'll never really understand people that enjoy banditry or random killing as it's not something I particularly care to do, but I've long since realized no two minds are alike so neither are two likes.

Edit to add: A little disappointed in the lack of a PvP outlet in game. War of towers will be diverting but I don't see that diversion lasting longer than a week. I'd love to be wrong!

Good post. I can't honestly really disagree on anything. My fiancée giggles at me for playing PFO. She refuses to try alpha which puts one of the best PvP healers I've ever met out of the equation. Is she a little shallow on the graphics, yeah. Where she isn't shallow is the game's responsiveness.

I personally can live with the graphics and animations. What kills me is how slow the game responds when I hit a button. Sometimes I'll have animations that are three actions ahead of the damage done to the mob. (I.E. I've hit an attack three times and the animations are keying but it was three actions ago that the damage killed the mob.) I'm not exactly sure what causes this. It could be lag, of course, but it's not an issue I have in other MMOs or on PS4 online games.

Achievements are grindy. I'd vote for a gold (training fee) gate for abilities over anything else. Does that mean people buying and then selling goblin balls could gain an advantage? Sure. Would I be killing the mobs from the achievements anyway? Not really, if I could help it. I suppose I might go after mobs that drop mats for stuff I want crafted or to gain coin but...meh. Maybe even to help out my settlement's crafting but still, meh.

Not really impressed by the article or its content but it is mmorpg so I'm not shocked. Despite the sensationalism and throwing about of big name raid guilds it's not entirely wrong. There was a fair amount of a grind to get raid attuned in Wildstar. I never made it. Honestly the game was just too hard for pug groups (that's not me saying I thought it was hard). I could only take beating my face into a brick wall of three hours of wipes in a normal dungeon with a PUG group. I don't agree with soulless though, just very unfriendly to casuals. I'd still be playing if my fiancée hadn't taken a break from MMOs. At the moment (yeah, yeah, potential and roadmap) the grind in PFO is worse for achievements. I'm hoping the Pax community provides a soul and reason for my grind.

Honestly I don't like the elves at all, but I'm just waiting/hoping for tieflings. I hate poison elf ears with a passion. If that is what pathfinder elves are like I knew there was a reason I'm not a fan of the system. ;) The faces look they fell down the ugly tree hitting every branch on the way down. Elves should look alien though so mission accomplished there.

Though I still feel combat is clunky it's improved for sure. Groups of mobs are still too leashed to their start point making killing big groups way too easy for someone solo. Shamans are mean and actually fairly dangerous; good job there! I have to be careful with ogre hurlers so that's good too.

I didn't realize there was a patch between yesterday and today. I kept the intermediate starting window up so I entered the game without patching. There were no mobs or gathering nodes in the game at all so that clued me in that I should restart everything. There should probably be some game version matching to get into the game.

I'm not a party to the political undertones in the thread. I do see that this NAP could very well funnel rabid PvP forces in specific directions (those that don't sign for example). Personally I'd rather see no NAP in the War of Towers at all. Whether I was in a small/large or good/evil guild it wouldn't matter. I'd want to test the logistics and ability of my PvP forces to have what we hold prior to OE. It will build necessary experience at a reduced cost. Getting this experience in settlement warfare has a much higher potential cost.

In alpha I tried a rogue long/short bow user, a wizard and a cleric. I gravitated more toward the bow user (without using the perma-sprint crutch) as it ended combat vastly more quickly and enabled me to explore.

1. Find monsters and take their stuff.

So yeah, this is in game but I found the reaction speed, animations and overall game responsiveness to be low/clunky. That's being nice. Combat wasn't much fun. I use a g13 gamepad with mouse turning for MMOs. It worked fine with the game. When I hit a button I'd like something to happen, given no latency issues. That being said I had no troubles and died once only due to lag, so the lack of responsiveness isn't a game breaker.

The drop rates were a little on the low side for what I wanted but high for what I didn't, but that's RNG for you. I had to make my first short bow which I don't mind.

The escalations I tried were solo so maybe the group experience is more fun, but these were pretty uninspiring. There's no farmer telling me the bandits stole his stuff so I pretty much know by osmosis what's going on in Sherwood Forest.

The leashing of groups of mobs is highly exploitable (they yo-yo back and forth) making the combat a lot easier. Taking out groups of six or seven solo with a bow was simple. I expect this will change with updated bow mechanics but you could do the same thing as a wizard or ranged cleric.

Tooltips, yeah I'm going to beat that dead horse. Deafening vs sickening critical. I can somewhat deduce what it is but who knows if I'm right or not.

2. Find resources and use resources to make stuff.

It's there. I'd like to see a greater variety of nodes honestly. Are we going to be able to chop down trees for wood eventually? Greater node variety (split up flowers and wood for example) and less material RNG would be nice but I do like that you can use more than one thing to make the crafted good sub-component. Finding things off PvE mobs is a nice touch as well. I will admit I could have tested this out more but I was more interested in playing around with the character and combat mechanics.

3. Stuff is good. Get better stuff and kill monsters harder.

I never really got better stuff. I crafted a t1 hunter's short bow. I killed things faster with the t0 mob dropped hunter's long bow. I liked the short bow play style better, however, so I stuck with it.

4. Kill another player and take their stuff.

More like kill someone that tries to kill me and take their stuff but obviously this isn't in game yet.

Overall opinion:

-Need companies and social mechanics.
-Optimize combat to make it fluid/responsive and fun
-Class balance but most important range vs melee balance
-Red wizard needs PvP badly. I'm fine with the reputation where it is but there needs to be something voluntary if you want people to play.
-Animations and combat/spell effects please!

All that being said I'm hoping for more alpha-ing so I can mess around with a heavily armored melee.