Morbis's page

Or, and just wait for this, he has read the description and honestly believes that, by what we have been told, it feels weak. Unfortunately we can't actually tell how good it will be until we get one more piece of information. The current stealth description is that it reduces your current sight range by a percentage of your total sight range, down to a minimum of 10%.

If the current sight range is 200yards, that means that fighting a completely useless starting character (someone who hasn't had the chance to train perception) they can get within 20yards. That isn't that close. And that is the best case scenario. That is plenty of time for the enemy to react and start running away. As the potential sight range increases, or your target becomes more competent (because I can promise you that most people will pump perception, because people hate stealthers) it will become even worse. 200yards isn't that far in the game engine. And 100yards (equally skilled stealth and perception) is more than far enough for the defender to react.

Edit: Removed the snark. Sorry, it's late.

The actual challenge, especially for developers thinking of pushing out a one server game, is making challenging PvE content that doesn't rely on quick reactions. If you have Move or Die attacks that are difficult to avoid for local players, you rapidly begin to run into issues when you introduce higher ping players.

What might be a difficult but possible dodge for a US player can quickly become an impossible dodge for someone from the EU. I imagine that most non-US players have experienced this in some otherwise easy US based games. There are methods to minimise that, of course. Well written netcode can adjust for small discrepancies. You can process AoE attacks locally rather than on the server (though, as with all local processing, this opens up an arena for hackers). But I can see this being a constant thorn in the side of GoblinWorks when conceiving their design space.

I would really rather not have all 'high difficulty' PvE content be gated away from anyone not in the continental US, which Move or Die mechanics have the possibility of doing. PvP is already going to be enough of a chore for us.

Wheaton's Law

You know, it's a strange turn of events that had the general rule been 'Don’t be a Dick' I wouldn't have nearly as much of an issue with it. Dick means something to me. Killing someone isn't being a dick to them, but it could very well be being a jerk. I believe that the intent behind 'Don't be a Jerk' and Wheaton's Law are close the the exact same, however the language use changes it completely in my mind.

Which is, perhaps, more telling about me than anything else.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Except when he is clearly my enemy, of course.

It isn't that complicated a policy. We will do everything we can to maximize our mechanical advantage will creating as large of a mechanical disadvantage against our enemy. That could involve the complete interdiction of all persons found within a declared war zone. It could mean the outright murder of anyone found in that war zone. It could mean breaking casual relations with a particular merchant. If it is deemed pragmatic, in both the short and long term, it will be considered an option.

Roger = Morbis

Boulders away!

I would love a degree of clarification on that point, myself. I am fine if you anticipate Chaotic Evil players having a difficult time because they are largely forced to deal with other Chaotic Evil players. I would be less fine if Chaotic Evil players have a difficult time simply because of a universal negative modifier.

How very hopeless is reason amongst Gamers.

There we go, an ad hominem, the last refuge of someone who doesn't actually have an actual argument.

The smallest mechanical advantage purchased with out of game funds is pay to win. If a health potion purchased with out of game funds ever creates a situation in which someone who bought it wins a fight against someone who didn't, that is pay to win. That people can freely buy secondary accounts within the scope of the rules and use those accounts to train alternate skills is pay to win (though one I find acceptable).

The cash shop will have pay to win aspects to it. They may be exceedingly small. Players who don't use them and win against those who do are better players. Again, nothing Bluddwolf said misrepresents that fact.

He isn't misrepresenting anyone. The cash shop will have items that you can buy, and those items will give you an advantage over someone who doesn't. That is the definition of pay to win. Whether or not it is an acceptable level of pay to win is up to the individual to determine. If someone who doesn't participate in the cash shop can rise above the disadvantage and still beat those who do, they are, again, by definition more skilled players.

Nothing in Bluddwolfs post is misrepresenting those facts. Nothing in Bluddwolfs post is inflammatory. Trying to build drama where there isn't any is.

Really? You find that antagonistic? You find a post by Bluddwolf specifically calling for one of his members to calm down (in a respectful manner) antagonistic? And Bluddwolf is the one who is going against the spirit of the armistice? Please.

Ooo! OOOOooo! This is it! It's my turn to post a picked quote from one of the developer blogs to support my position!

As happens a lot these days, you're getting the unvarnished "we had this idea one week, presented it to the major stakeholders the next, and nobody had an immediate objection so you get to see it the week after that" design ideas. Keep in mind that any of these ideas can and most likely will change (potentially drastically) as we move deeper into implementation.

What is considered Sanctioned at the moment may not be Sanctioned at EE. What is considered Unsanctioned at the moment may become Sanctioned at OE. Stop looking to the blogs for concrete information, for folly lies down that path.

Keep in mind that shallow power-curves also encourage player skill, which tends to be a function of time played. When a game is balanced for low power accretion over time, the mechanical ability of the individual player becomes more and more important. While you may be able to have the exact same power build as a player that is online three times as often as you are, chances are you will still be unable to compete with them on a mechanical level.

This is the basis of every competitive game, and the lengths that the developers would have to go to to mitigate it would destroy any semblance of skill based play. Unfortunately the casual player will always be at a discrete disadvantage to the dedicated. It is better to accept this, and work within your means as much as possible using the time you have.

Outside of Eve and WOW, it is a failed model. Having two successful games out of dozens does not indicate success of the model.

Correlation does not imply causation. Sure, those games could have failed because of the subscription model. They could have also failed because, by and large, they were terrible games which overreached. Warhammer had no real end game at release. SWTOR had no real end game at release. AION was buggy as all hell at release.

The subscription model didn't kill those games, incompetence killed those games.

Wanting everything in the game for only the basic subscription which has been clearly described as including only training and some non-specified perks is wanting something for nothing. Not just wanting, demanding. Pretending your position represents all gamers is a falsehood. You accuse GW of greed when in reality it is you who are greedy.

No. Disagreeing with the developers is not greed. Arguing for the current paradigm is not greed. It may be misguided, it may not be a sustainable business model. But it isn't greed. This is the way that things have worked for the last decade. From a player point of view, it has worked very well, even if developers feel otherwise. It is in the best interest of the players to argue for the system that best benefits them. That isn't greed, it's being pragmatic.

Wanting something for nothing is also greed. Entitlement.

*cough strawman cough* What? Who said that? Anyway. The people that are arguing against a cash shop don't want something for nothing. They want to the current paradigm of “I pay my subscription, I get the game” to continue. That is the opposite of wanting something for nothing. They want to give GW their money, they just feel that cash shops aren't the best way to do that.

I happen to have little issue with cash shops when they are implemented well (see League of Legends). The trouble is that the vast majority of developers are terrible at cash shops.

Rule one is don't be a jerk.

Except that that is a terrible rule. It is entirely subjective, and doesn't actually tell the players what is expected of them. What one person might consider being a jerk, another might consider standard operating procedure. And the same applies for individual GM's, who are not infallible. Most of them are low on the totem pole, under paid and under appreciated staffers.

Which is why having capricious GM's is potentially so dangerous. What might be an acceptable activity one day becomes unacceptable the next (Dancey has gone so far as to say that this is expected). If I happen to kill you one too many times in a day and GM Bob, who is having a bad day because his wife left him, decides to ban me for it, is that my fault? Should I lose years of character investment because I have no real means of appeal, but I can't even really tell if the ban was considered legitimate?

And it isn't as if we haven't seen GM's become corrupted by their power in previous games. The internet is full of verified stories of GM's powertripping and committing incorrigible actions.

A key part of their "arbitrary" GM actions idea is that they do have a basis for their actions, but they don't tell the players what that basis is. In the case of names it would likely be defined as something like "anything that breaks copyright, is already a famous name, contains offensive words, or is otherwise disruptive". Yes, even that is vague with the last part, but they want to give the GM's whatever wiggle room they need to do their job.

I was concerned about “arbitrary GM's” for reasons similar to Qallz, but this was the argument that people at Pax managed to drill into my skull to assuage them. Just because the GM's aren't telling us what rules and regulations they are following doesn't mean that those rules and regulations don't exist. There will still be oversight of staff, you are still as protected from a GM having a bad day as you are now. They are just being less transparent about the whole thing.

I would still prefer that GM's actions were kept as transparent as physically possible, and I personally believe that Dancey's “people will toe the line” argument is drek, but I don't think we have too much to worry about.

Alexander_Damocles wrote:

No. If such a system were implemented, I would immediately unsubscribe. If a player has gotten so bad they need to be banned, then the administrators do it. You delete my personal property, for no good legal reason? That's bloody well near theft.

In case you missed my opinion: ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Yea, that about sums it up.

I'm fairly sure if I said NOPE as much as I want to, I would be banned from the forums.

They won't result in an inability, but they will be a limiter. If you are expecting to be able to hold a settlement with the help of your ten friends then you are going to be disappointed. If all you want to do is stake out a point of interest and run it efficiently, then most of the time these conglomerates will be happy to accommodate. We can't be everywhere, and overextension is a constant worry.

Plan accordingly. Send out feelers into the established community. You don't have to become an outright member of the Xeilian Empire to be considered friendly enough that we won't come kicking down your door. Maelstrom was one of those smaller organization not two months ago. Now look at us.

And you are not an investor.

This is important to keep in mind. We are not investors. At most we are patrons.

As the Chaotic Evil leader of Maelstrom, the empire is working in a completely different way than our council did. Morbis, King of the Everything, will be the ruler of all that he can see. I would love to see a good organization join with us, for that much needed fodder.

=D

I honestly think that you are going to be disappointed, then. A lot of players play games to win. They don't really care about the means through which they get that win, they just care that at the end of the day they are the better player. As such, optimised builds will always become the most prevelent. Combined with the fact that the developers have said that balance isn't their number one priority (a mistake, in my mind), the chances of cookie cutter builds for PvP not appearing are slim.

This is the nature of competitive gaming. You don't play the game you want to play, you play the game that you are given. People who embrace that attitude tend to dominate. You can feel free to ignore the metagame, but you probably won't be competitive. The cookie cutters builds tend to exist for a reason. They tend to be the most effective at what they aim to do.

It doesn't matter how gradual the power curve is. Even at the very start of the game, if polearms are perceived to do 5% more damage than daggers, the majority of competitive players will use polearms.

I would just like to say that I find it absolutely amazing that people are claiming that the new school of roleplaying is mechanical. Have you played 1st and 2nd edition? The two games that were literally built on top of a wargame? The game that the initial designers of have repeatably said they didn't intend for what tabletop roleplaying has now become?

Pathfinder didn't decide to go into roleplaying any-more than 4E did (other than the Pathfinder business model being based off of selling adventures, not rulebooks, that is). Both facilitate the exact same amount of roleplaying. The only difference between the two is that the balance has been shifted from an entire adventure and into the set-piece encounter. And that one is actually built on a mechanically sound base rather than the “throw numbers at wall, lets see what sticks” approach of 3E.

Anyway, back to age related discussions.

Ryan Dancey wrote:

I never said you'd need a phone to play the game. There's no such plan.

I think the comment might have been something along the line of needing good communications i.e. a cell phone, for that 3am call to come defend the settlement.

Edit: Just noticed you didn't state that it was, and you were adding information. So that bit down there isn't aimed at you specifically.

Then I don't see the issue? If you want to be a competitive player in a PvP game then you do, generally, need to be contactable at all times. It is fairly common for the upper echelons of large gaming organizations to have each others mobile phone numbers, person emails, or even house phone numbers. If the city is under attack by the Koreans and all the Americans are asleep, the call gets put out and the serious players get their asses to the computer.

He wasn't saying anything at all controversial.

Repeat after me...wise, experienced, and well seasoned... :)

Let me try! Overripe, decrepit, and stiff. Did I get it right? =D

Morbis posted but didn't list his age. I believe he's in his mid-twenties (24?).

I imagine that I am one of the younger regulars at 24

You lie! Yeah, I'm the youngest so far. PotatoMcWhiskey, one of the other Maelstrom players, is 22. I think he is our youngest.

I imagine that I am one of the younger regulars at 24. The game doesn't release for another year, at least, and they haven't done any real marketing for it yet. That means that the majority of people who have heard about it will have done so because it is Pathfinder, which is a table top game. Though the graying of the hobby has generally been averted in the last few years, it still holds more sway amongst older gamers than the younger crowd.

When release gets closer, and the game becomes better known amongst general gaming circles (especially once the general culture has established itself) we will get a much better understanding of the community we are going to be dealing with. Hopefully we can keep everything above board, and the older voices (those older than I am, that is, I don't consider myself one of them yet) won't be drowned out by the influx of brasher youngsters.

The result would be that no one would ever get recruited to an organization without an incredibly indepth interview process. The game developers have said that they want to encourage people leaving the newbie zones. Sanctioning organizations for the actions of their members does the exact opposite of that. One of the best methods for tempering the actions of a abusive players is to place them into an active crowd of better behaving players. Punishing groups for their members would prevent that from every happening. No organization would recruit the members with any risk of being sanctioned, which means they are never in the company of better players.

Punishing players should be targeted, it should be entirely in the purview of well trained customer support staff, and it should preferably be transparent. You cannot automate banning systems. There are far too many ways that griefers can then take control of the system and bend it to their means.

Reputation should only come into account of when a player is banned (which that Curse is. It is a week long ban by another name) if reputation is somehow tied into how favoured one is by Pharasma, and even then I would consider it a mistake.

Remember that reputation has no bearing on how much someone deserves a ban, unless the developers outright say that people should not be engaging in unsanctioned PvP. A character who kills an unsanctioned target once per week, but otherwise acts as a kindly individual could still have a low reputation. The only thing that reputation measures is the ratio of sanctioned:unsanctioned combat (or other activities that alter reputation) a player is involved in.

If reputation was renamed to Favour of Pharasma, then having a curse levied onto a player for unsanctioned PvP would make sense. You are killing other characters who have been blessed with her favour, and she doesn't appreciate that, so there goes the benefits of her favour to you for a little while. Sanctioned PvP becomes PvP that is Sanctioned by Pharasma, which actually makes sense from an RP PoV. It makes the entire thing more acceptably arbitrary (Pharasma, as a god, is arbitrary after all).

However bans should be withheld for actual griefers. And unsanctioned PvP isn't griefing. You can grief while you are performing unsanctioned PvP, but you can also grief while you are standing in the middle of town twiddling your thumbs.

The GW-folk occasionally remind us that some ideas won't happen due to legal restrictions in one country or another. Does anyone know of laws regarding desecration of corpses in games, or whether existing real-life desecration laws could be applied to games?

China has extremely strict laws on what can and cannot be shown in regards to corpses. Nothing skeletal. Nothing that could be consider desecration. Extremely minimal gore. I could see Goblinworks having trouble with Chinese officials if they include things like zombies. At the very least they would need to issue alternate models.

As with most arguments on these forums I think that the trouble with the "is Faction Warfare meaningful" argument is largely based on miscommunication. I do not believe that those calling Faction Warfare meaningless are implying that there isn't reason behind it, or that it isn't thematically compelling. Rather that in its current form it has no integration with the other elements of the game.

Consider – PvP combat has an extremely clear influence on those people not involved in PvP combat. Who owns what territory, who controls what resources, who controls gets to walk down this road. All of these things integrate PvP combat with the rest of the game. Similarly, merchants are directly integrated into the rest of the game in a similar manner. When a merchant decides to raise all of their prices they influence every single player in the game.

But how are players not involved in Faction Warfare influenced by the actions of those who are? There have been hints that some buildings may only be available to those high ranking member who spend a lot of their time fighting for their cause. So far that is the only integration I have seen so far. For those players not involved in Faction Warfare the actions of those who are are largely meaningless.

That could be a symptom of lack of information. No one knows how Faction Warfare is actually going to be implemented (and any information they have released will almost certainly change before OE). If you use "do uninvolved players care about this?" as a measurement for how meaningful a subsystem is, Faction Warfare currently falls flat.

I will fall firmly into the 'As obvious as possible, without making my eyes bleed.' camp.

As a competitive PvP gamer I thrive off of information. Every single decision should be calculated, thought through and considered before being made. In combat those decisions have to be made at lightning speed, with as little hesitation as possible. I need to know which of my debuffs are still being applied, which of my buffs I need to refresh, at which point of the animation cycle my attacks are actually going off. Strong particle effects are both the clearest and the easiest method for showing that.

While there are benefits to being completely unaware of a players capabilities before engaging them (it tends to lower random ganking, for one), there are fewer to restricting that information once combat has actually begun. I would be disappointed if Goblinworks decided against making that information as transparent as physically possible. At the very least I would hope that they would provide toggles so that players who want that information can display it with ease.

Obviously I am not Bluddwulf, and he might mean something different, however;

An entitlement to having the game fulfil your ingame wants, rather than having the players work on fulfilling them themselves. You may have seen competitive players on gaming websites complain about how developers are building towards the common denominator, the much maligned 'casual'. This is what they tend to be talking about.

In a Themepark MMOs the only thing stopping most competent players from accomplishing any of the ingame content is time. Barring competition at the very highest level (Top 100 WoW Raiding for example) none of the content is designed to actually be particularly challenging. This is, generally, done on purpose to attract the maximum number of people and to hit that part of the brain that sparks that rewarding feeling you get.

Sandbox MMOs, on the other hand, generally have actual skill as the barrier to accomplishing ingame goals. Do you want to own an Inn that players from hexes around frequent? You better be prepared to compete with one thousand similarly motivated players. Do you want to own the most legendary weapon in the game, the envy of every swordsman throughout the land? You better be prepared to compete with one thousand similarly motivated players who are now hunting you down.

Themepark MMOs have created a generation of gamers within which failure is not an option. If they cannot accomplish something it means that the developers have failed them, and that it is the developers duty to fix that. They will cry 'OP' or 'NERF!' at the first possible sign of difficulty. They tend to follow the 'scrub' mentality of self imposed rules over victory. Obviously this has always been present, there will always be players unwilling to learn and grow into their wants. But the constant reward-for-no-risk cycle that Themepark MMOs have developed has exacerbated the situation greatly.

You shouldn't always get what you want. There should be times as a player that you are forced to stop, reconsider your goals and then move forward. Maybe you aren't skilled enough to be the wielder of the Banner of Rovagug. Other people are better than you at that. But that's OK, because there is probably another aspect of the game that you are better than they are.

Themepark MMOs largely do not do that, and their players have grown entitled to the feeling that anything is possible. Even for those people that can only barely tie their shoes.

Things look great! Except... tab-targeting? Really? That's disappointing.

It's the only way to realistically do a single shard game. Good luck having people from Europe and people from America playing on the same server with minimum latency issues on a non-tab-targetting system.

Gathering Skill Minimum: Mining, Herbalism, Skinning. Those are the three I consider vitally important. Most things I can immediately think of can be slotted into one of those three. Mining obviously covers metals, gems, raw stone. Herbalism covers herbs, woodcutting, farm crops. Skinning covers animal skins, specific animal parts.

Crafting Skill Minimum: Weapon and Armour Smithing (either split or together), Fletching (including Bowyery), Leatherworking, Tailoring, Alchemy. Edit: Forgot something for the magical users. Maybe rename Fletching to Woodwork and throw staves in there. Those cover what I consider mandatory. There are plenty of things that you can build on top of that (Masonry, Woodworking, etc.) but I feel that those five cover the basics.

If I do make my twin a crafter then he will probably be skinning/leatherworker.

I know that crafting is already largely decided in how it is happening, but I would really, really, REALLY encourage Goblinworks to look at the crafting in FF14. It is by far the best crafting system in any game I have ever played. Except maybe SWG. It is the only game that I am happy logging into for a night and only doing crafting.

While I appreciate the video, and it is very nice, I have to say I was hoping for a blog post. However those are done for our benefit, and not exactly necessary, so I can't complain too much. Video looks good. Some things I hope get polished up, but as it is pre-alpha I can hardly expect perfection. Glad to see that it is all going well.

Quick question, I know that the latest Unity build has multi-threading support. Any idea whether or not PFO will be making full use of the newly developed Unity features between now and release? Nothing I have seen looks that CPU intensive, but every little helps.

Or maybe they are the same guy

My theory is the Bludd, Andius, Nihimon and possibly Ryan Dancey are all actually the same person, playing the very long game.

Nothing is restricting the other settlement either, if they so choose...

Right, at which point being forced to leave your town is no longer an issue, and so low reputation becomes less of a negative for the group. The person I was quoting was implying that one of the disincentives for having a low reputation would be that player towns might kick them out. Without extremely substantial modifiers for the town they are a part of, I can't see that happening. At least not for those members lucky enough to be 'made men'.

@Audoucet But at the absolute zero of rep, you might have been kicked out your PC town. There have been hints that if you don't have access to the training you once had, those nice feats can't be slotted.

Have they announced the mechanics behind how low reputation individuals will affect settlements? I seem to remember there being talk of the game taking averages of members when determining modifiers? If that is the case, then there will be settlements that are perfectly willing to have very low reputation characters simply because of the advantages they bring.

Consider two settlements. One doesn't have any low reputation individuals. The other has a small cadre of low reputation individuals, but their presence is largely balanced out by the very high reputation individuals that is keeps as well. Which of these two settlements has the advantage in a guerrilla war? Without seeing that exact mechanics of development indices, I would say the one that can ruthlessly engage anyone at anytime (the latter settlement).

Purchase statistics are only relevant if you are already engaged in a micro transaction economy. In a subscription model usage statistics are the exact equivalent. What content players are engaging with while they have an active subscription measures exactly what content players are willing to pay for. They are literally already paying for it.

Consider the potential future where third party companies are producing content.

That would be a time where I would be willing to pay with micro-transactions. As long as the third party content creators are getting a substantial percentage of the profit (ala Valve) then I am more than willing to buy additional content.

They can absolutely monitor what content is most used and is least used... without requiring you to pay for it. Eve does it all the time and in fact they put out graphs showing what minerals/loot are used on a quarterly basis. They have also shown what NPC's are farmed most and at what levels.

Theoretically it really isn't that difficult to find out what content people are interacting with. You can parse all the information you need from server logs, and the developers have complete access to those. Need to know what percentage of the population is using the themepark PvE content? Parse the server logs for zone ins on the themepark content. Need to know what percentage of the population is participating in the mining/gathering metagame? Parse the server logs for people who are actively walking around a zone with the gathering skills equipped.

There are plenty of arguments for micro-transactions. Data recovery and processing is not one of them, at least in an MMORPG setting.

In theory ? Yeah. In fact… H-sec is pretty secure.

I don't mean to be rude when I say this, but if that was your experience then you didn't do anything particularly worthwhile in high security. Or you got extremely lucky. Or you were tucked away in some backwater system that no one ever visited.

War-decs being so incredibly cheap meant that our high security pirate corp (and the many others like it) were constantly at war with 'care bear' corporations. If we found someone making even a lick of considerable profit they instantly became a target.

May I ask what in particular you did in EvE?

Bluddwolf wrote:

deisum wrote:

Consequence-free nonconsensual PVP combat is a system that appeals to a very select group, and has been repeatedly shown to be a commercial failure.

...except for in EVE Online.

No. Not even in EVE.

You are aware that there is non-consensual, consequence free PvP in high-sec space right? That the people in high-sec space are still subject to quite a lot of non-consensual, consequence free PvP? And that EvE online is a commercial success despite this?

And I'm not talking about wars, or suicide ganking. I spent a year and a half committed to high security piracy, basically freely killing mission runners and miners by using the games aggro mechanics to my advantage.

Does hiring someone else to take care of your wetwork count as "avoiding PVP" ?

OK, this is where the way I discuss things breaks down slightly. No, those people are not avoiding PvP, because PvP is not limited to hitting people over the heads with sticks. In a sandbox game with a player driven economy the vast majority of player interaction is PvP.

Are you a merchant who lives out in player territory, who arms his fellow men and women with weapons, who aggressively pursues profit and isn't worried about undercutting an advisory to get ahead? Then you are as much a PvP'er as the person on the walls firing arrows at the approaching enemy army.

So no, those people are not avoiding PvP. They are very much involved in the PvP metagame. They are, in fact, intricate gears in the greater machine.

That depends entirely on how well they design sanctioned PvP. The reason most games that don't have unsanctioned PvP fail as PvP games is because the methods they provide for PvP aren't well designed.

I want to attack a caravan in a timely manner that doesn't a) allow the caravanner to simply run away before I can attack them and b) doesn't allow the caravanner to put out the call over Vent and have 100 of his friends there super quick. Does the sanctioned PvP method for doing this (SADs) allow me to do this? If yes, then I never have a reason to simply ambush the caravan. If no, then I will ambush them every single time.

I believe that the vast majority of the people who push for unsanctioned PvP to be more consequence free do so because they have little faith in the developers to provide satisfactory sanctioned equivalents. Not because the developers of this game have done anything wrong, but because the past developers of other games have screwed the pooch so many times, over and over.

I believe that it could thrive, even without what I would consider satisfactory sanctioned PvP. But I don't believe I would enjoy the game, and I don't think that the game would be as exciting for everyone else.

Or are you perhaps talking about "people on the other extreme of the spectrum" in general, and not on these forums?

I was, sorry, I should have been clearer. Honestly the vast majority of the posters on this forum are solidly central in what they advocate for. But unfortunately this forum doesn't exist in a vacuum, and people will act in accordance to how they have been treated elsewhere, on different games.

Should it be done here, or are the mechanics of caravans a separate topic that can mostly be divorced form the morality of robbing caravans?

I feel that divorcing the actual mechanics of caravans away from the hot topic of banditry might be a good idea. Less likely to raise heckles that way. Though the mechanics of caravans must also take into mind how they are attacked, so perhaps not.

I feel that that mischaracterises the motivation of many PvP advocates. They aren't pushing for open world, free-for-all PvP because they want to gank some n00bs, lulululul. They are pushing for it because the vast majority of games that have tried to compromise have turned out flat and stale. They try to push non-PvP areas out of games because the vast majority of developers are terrible at balancing risk-reward such that the vast majority of players have no reason to ever leave the protected areas.

Note that I am for protected newbie zones, I am generally in favour of the Reputation system as described (I have some issues), and I don't want an absolute murderfest that many people describe games like Darkfall as (even when it wasn't, especially at release). But what I don't want to see is a character being able to completely avoid PvP for their entire character life and still be able to progress as quickly as someone who does risk their life and gear. And that is exactly what some people on the other extreme of the spectrum push for.

The game cannot simply disincentive those who want to PvP. There must also be a strong incentive for those who don't want to PvP to risk it anyway. PvE advocates are not the only people with the health of the community in mind.

Aeioun Plainsweed wrote:

faction gear, wooooot!

I hope not. This would undermine player crafters being the source of all meaningful gear.

Faction recipes would be much more acceptable in my mind. Even if it was only a cosmetic change. Being able to wear Plate Mail of the [Insert Holy Order] would be much more invocative for a Paladin than just wearing the plain metal gray suit.

Though I wouldn't like to see being able to wear the cosmetic change as being faction restricted, only making it. I think it would be interesting to see if they would propagate amongst the general population, or if the crafters with access to the appearance would police themselves and keep it within the org.

You... you do understand that Ryan Dancey isn't infallible right? Just because he believes that one has more worth than another doesn't actually make it true.