Due to the fact that the Empire of Xelias is no longer Evil, the Everbloom alliance worries this will leave an Evil vacuum of sorts which may draw all manner of unsavory types into the game to play the new Evil group. To head off this scary possibility, Everbloom Alliance has decided to follow the axiom "If you want something done right, do it yourself". BRIGHTHAVEN - Is now fully Chaotic Evil and will be using its superior numbers to raid gathering operations across the map to inhibit gear advancement among any other groups. KEEPERS PASS - Is now Lawful Lawful and declares every item in its auction house, no matter what it is, shall be sold for 47 copper. PHAEROS - Are now Pittsburgh Penguins fans.
People who PvP are competitive and want to see clear evidence they won. Everywhere. Even the forums. You can't put much import in these threads because at least half of every post is tactical verbal maneuvering, feints, and pushes to disable some ideas and and advance their own so they can win that too.
The entire point of Emerald Lodge was to be a base of lore and eventual operations for the Emerald Spire and its impact on our version of Golarion. The neutrality is purely in service of that goal. Without the neutrality and achievement of that goal, Emerald Lodge is just another city but also sandwiched between two lumbering superpowers. The reason every other political entity was willing to go along with the idea of "Emerald Lodge is neutral so maybe allow it to be a stable platform for the Spire" is we believe that is good for the game. The simplest answer with current changes is we, the political entities in the game world, agree to let Emerald Lodge have eight specific towers unmolested to be a successful settlement, again for the long term good of the game. The Emerald Eight need not all be the closest ones to the town. Some/most could be far flung ones that we wouldn't want to trudge out to fight over anyway. WoT is a temporary condition we find ourselves in and there will be plenty of other towers to fight over for the bloodthirsty. Having level 10 training available gives Emerald Lodge a healthy environment for Pathfinder Society players to join the game, be successful, stay in the game and bring others. Id and schadenfreude aside, if we were all willing to not destroy Emerald Lodge long term for the good of the game, then donating eight out of the way towers to the same end should be a simple decision.
Targeting, auction houses, husks, resource distribution, what constitutes ganking, nothing else matters if people log in for a few hours see a barren world with no one to interact with and never come back. ------------ Well, that didn't take long. Maybe I'll expand a little. The game in it's current state is REALLY REALLY boring as a solo game. The first time I played EVE I quit after a few weeks because running missions and dodging low sec death became boring, and there's even less to do in the current game world. On the other hand, ask any person that has played in the last two months what their most fun moments were and 98/100 of them will say when players gathered and stacked 14 high, waged a 12-person skirmish for a tower, battled the escalation with purple NPCs, or some big team event like that.
For anyone not already a part of the handful of large organizations, in-game chat is the only way they have to connect with anyone else. Right now hex chat might get three people talking at a time on the best day. Recruitment Channel - I know Ryan has a personal vendetta against global channels (and Help should definitely be limited to help), but we NEED a global recruitment channel. The organized player groups need to be able to reach every new player whatever hex they wander into. Every new player needs to interact with different companies to spot one that feels like the best fit. Some day far in the future it might get shades of Barrens chat which also removes real communication and game community, but losing a conversation at the hex border or limited to five other people in a party is vastly oversteering in the opposite direction to the same results. Today reaching players wherever they are is vital for growing groups and seeding the game world like we're supposed to be doing. Settlement Channel - Ask anyone in any settlement, we need it right now. Last thing is the actual typing, we should be able to see all the channels and whispers like Local currently does, but chat in a specific one until we manually change to another i.e. everything we type is in settlement chat until we /h to hex for a quick comment then /s back to settlement. Most people agree GW is making great progress in art, coding, design, new features etc. but don't kid yourselves. Players connecting to other players is the only thing that brings any of us back to any multiplayer game and right now when Pathfinder Online is being actively judged and talked about we don't have the tools to do that most fundamental part of an MMO.
One Way To Guide: I sit in the Help channel and not only answer the questions as asked but also offer extra information that seems like it will improve the game experience of whoever was asking something. When something comes to mind, sometimes they just want to know where the skirmisher is.
The EBA in general has made an interesting opening move that is currently being heavily discussed among some factions who are debating how this affects them, how much they should ultimately care, and what if any response should be. The EBA's intent is also not entirely known, so perhaps some of this is overblown, we'll probably find out in the next few days. That party that fought Thod was looking for pvp fun at a contested tower not covered under the NAP. That's the answer to all your questions. Details: EL had a 700 point lead by the time combat started in earnest and could generate up to 50 points per minute. The outcome as far as tower control was never much in question in my mind. Tactically it's a bad time sink to anyone planning to take over the entire world considering all the nearby claimable unoccupied towers at the time (first thing after server came up). Crafting is fun but many people enjoy an occasional quick pvp change-up.
If this is to stop the ridiculous recipe farming from starter goblins then just take out the recipes, tokens, and coin from their tables so there is no point to killing them except the tutorial quest and if you're a new character after starting gear. As an armor smith I *KNOW* I'm not going to make +0 for the market - the raw inputs have a minimum value for their use in T1+2 armor which makes +0 armor way too expensive for first day players who start with no copper. T1+0 is entirely separate from the blossoming economic system. The only reason to take an unlimited +0 spigot out of the game is if there was scrapping for crafting materials, which there isn't. Armor +0 is already incredibly hard to find with just a club/wand/focus/shortbow as it is. If you take starter gear off the starter mobs, you'll be leaving new players without a source of +0 gear unless you put it into the tutorials (where I think it should have been all this time anyway).
So the alpha period is over and the servers are offline to switch over to Early Enrollment. When you follow the instructions in the blog to download the new version of the client, you end up at a page that currently says "Current client version is 16.0". That is the older version of client from alpha that GoblinWorks is recommending we uninstall. It means the page is not yet updated with the link to the new EE client. We need to wait just a little longer for the version to update past the alpha 16.0 to get the Early Enrollment client. I'm sure someone will update this post when the new client is available.
If anyone sees a redhead with a name similar to mine in game going on a sangria fueled consequence-free murder spree muttering Fallout Boy lyrics incoherently over the mangled corpses of unsuspecting victims it's... umm... an imposter. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Wow I wonder what Andius is doing in all those other games he's paying attention to because he doesn't care about Pathfinder Online and never thinks about it and has forever ceased testing the software or reading the forums about it because it's so awful and just a waste of his supremely valuable time. Well, I guess we'll never know.
Getting around to putting this in a linkable/downloadable space and making sure this link to Sin's Subterfuge Guide actually works.
I'm not old but I have the technological enthusiasm of someone in a rocking chair on a porch whittling wood the day a storm is going to hit, or so my knee tells me. I've put off doing the new-fangled tricks until just now. This is a test to see if this link to the Martial Guide works. Edit: Ok I think I properly set it to access with the link and hopefully no one else can edit. Time to start making it presentable I guess.
I mean, other than there aren't any auctions in them.... All that stuff in your vault that you'll never use before the wipe and EE starts? Put it in the market for 1 copper each! It doesn't cost anything so even your town bound alts that never looted a copper in their life can do it. Market use has suffered serious atrophy from the beginning. So being good alpha testers that made it to the end (and in the spirit of breaking stuff!) lets load up the market system with as much inventory as possible and see what happens! Then for extra credit start using all that currently worthless Abadar credit to buy things, then re-list them again. You know like a bustling market full of inventory and transactions. Maybe we'll find some goblins in the code for Mark. Remember, when time is short and and everything is about to go black except for the absurdly bright JJ Abrams moon, still IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO BREAK THE GAME!!!!
While some people may be personally busy the next few weeks, the majority have been waiting for EE to start for quite a long time. We've been in alpha for two months too long because of server performance. Don't make people work on Christmas, but the basic principle is: if it can be ready to go on Dec 26, then it needs to go on Dec 26.
This is the original meaning of a guide. It is not a dressed up spreadsheet or step-by-step checklist of what to train and when. You'll still need to play your game your way. Set up - A feat that can apply a state to the target (or sometimes an affect on you) that will give additional benefits to following attacks.
Another note is the difficulty in assigning a damage value to the Penetrating feature of attacks that have that because it is currently extra damage based on the target's resistance. It is planned to change into a reduction of the target's armor total in a future iteration. Also, daggers and short blades are smaller weapons so almost all of their attacks are uninterruptible. The downside to that is they don't have as much juice in the upfront damage department to make up for the risk of being interrupted/out ranged like slower attacks have. If you walk up to something with a dagger expecting to press a button and smack it as hard as a two-handed sword these weapons will seem a bit underpowered. You need teamwork between your armor, feature, reactive, utility, and attack feats. Most of all, appropriate for a category called Subterfuge, getting the most out of these weapons involves a little guile. - The weapon invented before humans were invented (seriously, Homo Habilis had them, crack a book)
Basic Dagger Strike - relatively high upfront damage for younger Subterfugers.
Feint-Basic Dagger Exploit has a total of 71 Base Damage for relatively strong direct immediate damage for beginners when needed.
(including short sword, rapier, cutlass) - Lots of people think pirates' favorite letter is RRRRRRRR, but really their heart belongs to the C.
Thrust-Compound finishes with the heaviest hit you can get with the weapon and leaves a DoT to work, so this functions much better as an opening. If you start at full stamina try to double up for Thrust-Compound-Compound and a really big DoT after a chunk of damage.
- Only five more strings then you have an axe.
Distant Shot - ZOMG FLAMING ARROWS!! The higher stamina cost gets you 35m longbow range, a minor DoT, and freakin' flaming arrows man. With a weapon swap this may also substitute as the set up for Compound or Footwork chains as the target closes to melee but avoid shooting bows in melee with enemies that have Attacks of Opportunity.
Running Shot-Snap Shot-Snap Shot gives yourself extra Reflex defense while slowing the target and creating a gap (in practice the gap is still hit and miss for me, if it works you may need to take a step towards the target to get in range for the second Snap Shot). Remember Dodging needs to be on you as the set up condition, so at the end of a melee exchange a dagger's Fan feat can also set it up without provoking Opportunity like Running Shot will. Slow applies a Reflex defense penalty, so you could jump into melee with a Compound chain taking advantage of the lower defense and leaving melee range again. Like I said at the beginning, Subterfugers benefit from some guile.
Rogue reactives are AWESOME. They proc if you hit while the target has Flat-Footed and the Feint utility can keep that state on your target pretty much all the time if you want so the reactives can be very reliable. The key thing to remember here is each stackable debuff works in a specific channel and only the highest magnitude debuff in each channel will have an affect on the target. BLEEDING, DRAINED, AND OBLIVIOUS ARE ON THE SAME CHANNEL if you use two of those as your reactives only one can ever be working at a time while the other goes wasted. (Weakness)Befuddling Strike - a strong penalty to attack and perception.
As for utilities, Feint is almost required since so much Subterfuge is based on Flat-footed. Evade is also very handy for separation when light armor needs to get out of the fire. Tumble and Resiliency are two closely related defensive utilities. Tumble increases your Reflex +20 for two rounds (with a two round cool down so it can be up nearly all the time) which helps against weapons and reflex spells like the fireballs and snow balls NPCs seem to be so fond of; if you use dagger Fan quickly gives the exact same defense which frees a utility slot. Resiliency gives physical resistance which at Tier 1 will put you between medium and heavy armor levels of protection for one of every three rounds.
All rogue feature feats give sneak attack damage and a chance to slow attack speed on Flat-footed attacks. A minor difference is in the keywords offered for sneaky tricks, the rogue expendables. The major difference comes with the second way each feat can grant sneak attack damage (you get regular sneak attack damage even if both conditions are met simultaneously). Cut-throat - while untargeted. The feat for the super sneaky. Obviously much more difficult to use when alone. Remember even if you get targeted you can still get sneak attack from Flat-footed.
Once you have the basics down you'll want your character to start increasing in power and this is the part of the guide that helps you get your sheet together. Weapons all have a Base Damage of 40; then gain a bonus +5 damage per minor keyword matched with its feat and +20 damage per matched major keyword. You get one major keyword at Tier 2 and another at Tier 3. When a keyword matches between gear and feat I call it "kp" for keyword points (or keyword power if you prefer) where each minor is 1 kp and majors are 4 kp up to a maximum cap of 12 kp on an attack. Gear tells you what keywords it has at each level of enhancement i.e where Longswords say "grants keywords based on upgrade: Slashing (+0), Sharp (+1), Balanced(+2), Razored (+3)". If you have a starter Steel Longsword that is +0 so it only has Slashing to pair with feats no matter how highly trained they are for 1 kp total. A Steel Longsword +2 has Slashing, Sharp, and Balanced for potentialy 3kp or +15 Base Damage. A Tier 2 Dwarven Steel Longsword +1 has the Masterwork major keyword with Slashing and Sharp minors for 4+1+1= 6 kp or +30 Base Damage. It takes a Tier 3 + 3 weapon with two major and four minor keywords to have the most powerful possible weapon at 12 kp for +60 Base Damage (if your feat is trained to match all of those keywords). Weapon feats gain potential keyword matches in a specific order from rank 1 to rank 6: +0, +1, +2, Tier 2, +3, Tier 3. At rank 4 you can match the T2 major keyword on a weapon but not the +3 minor keyword, you have to train up to rank 5 for that. Other feats for armor, features, reactives, utilities, etc. gain keywords at different rates but it works basically the same.
Chameleon - bonus to stealth, persuasion, and a huge bonus to Improved Critical for the sneaky killer types. Footpad's Leathers are best, Strapped Leather in T2.
*You can dual wield short sword and dagger either way, even dagger main and short sword offhand if you want a strategy based around Fan-Forehand-Compound DoT with Short Sword's bigger direct damage Exploit. *I worked out all this stuff using rank 2 Pioneer armor (Freeholder light, no rogue bonuses, because I already had it. Actual rogue armor will work much better for everything here) with 7 physical resist and 68 Reflex defense, light melee 2, ranged attack 3, rank 1 Daredevil, reactives, and starter weapons, all of which can be trained within the first two days of a character's life. *That said, this is how I repeatedly killed yellow-named Chainbreaker Ogres in 100% melee: -Stealth close, Feint-Shank-Shank (with Bleeding Attack 1 reactive that's 37 each, 74 total Bleeding in roughly five seconds).
(If the fight was longer I could Fan-Forehand to Distressed-Footwork as needed for the defensive bonus and Slow for my inter-DoT jogging session.) Tactical summary of 2 day old Subterfuger killing Ogres: Chainbreaker Ogres are heavy interrupters that can do damage but daggers are almost entirely uninterruptible. Quickly apply a heavy DoT then run away to spend most of your time not being attacked. Duh it's a freakin ogre, man.
It's already a doc with pretty formatting and everything which I copy/pasted into the forum. Gap closers may become worth the time when they consistently work. As it stands now taking any damage stops movement on the spot if the closing doesn't fail for some other more mysterious reason. For now I end up saving time and stamina just sprinting where I want to be. The more complete answer to your question is that 5/6 of my feats are neither gap closers nor nukes. I happen to love when opponents try to load up their hotbar with those. First because most of those feats aren't really nukes; mine does 294-300 damage per hit to average escalation mobs and 250+ to the most heavily armored players. Any T1 feat that ever does less than 200 damage to anything is nowhere near nuke class. Second is the tale of the EFT Warrior: EVE Fitting Tool (EFT) is a third party program that lets you hypothetically fit modules onto ships with adjustable skills to see how it all works out before spending the ISK or training on it. It does a simple damage x time calculation to come up with a dps amount. EFT Warriors are the kids who go for the highest possible hypothetical dps numbers without taking into consideration the real-game conditions and combat circumstances. They have a strong tendency to explode horrifically once meeting someone with lower dps on paper and fit for combat practicalities. Once you take away the EFT (PFO?) Warrior's ideal conditions to apply their hypothetical dps they have nothing else and quickly melt into a wet splotch on the ground.
This is the original meaning of a guide. It is not a dressed up spreadsheet or step-by-step checklist of what to train and when. It points you in the right direction for your idiom and helps pick the right weapon for the job. You'll still need to play your game your way. Set up - A feat that can apply a state to the target (or sometimes an affect on you) that will give additional benefits to following attacks.
This is not an exhaustive exposition on every single feat, but an overview of each weapon that visits notable feats and chains. Club/Mace - A simple start This is a small, fast weapon. It lacks strong finishing power and AoE but almost all of its attacks are uninterruptible if you want that as a compliment to a larger weapon vulnerable to interruption. Being a bludgeoning weapon it is oriented to a lot of incapacitation affects like stunning and exhaustion. Unfortunately it doesn't set up most of it's own secondary affects except for a Thwack-Escape to stun as you create a 20m gap. Beat - built up over several rounds this can interfere with the target using large abilities; Thwack does a little more pure damage for quicker fights.
Battleaxe - Mayhem on a stick A medium sized weapon with decent power, a good AoE, and lots of slowing so the party doesn't have to stop only your target's pulse. Nearly every feat comes with an Improved Critical bonus which is meaningless unless your Total Hit is equal or higher than the target's Total Defense, so I highly recommend maxing Heavy Melee attack to get that combat advantage. This includes Dragoon armor and Axe Specialization feat which gives even more Improved Critical with the Precise bonus. Also seriously consider avoiding Master of Opportunity instead using two Critical Reactive feats to make the most of all those critical hits. Carve - a splash AoE which hits everything for 2m in a circle around you.
Longsword - Now with 20% more dying. Just... wow. Middle strength attacks with a great AoE, and strong ability to slow and DoT which is great to catch those who want to avoid melee. Whirlwind - a splash AoE that hits everything in a 2m circle around you. It uses a lot of stamina which will leave you doing nothing for long periods if this is the only plan.
Greatsword - Building a better Conan I will call this a more advanced player skill weapon to use well. Gigantic attacks that use a lot of stamina (and are very vulnerable to interrupts); great for quick fights or finishing off in teams and more challenging if combat takes more than 3-4 hits at a time. Also with a decent AoE and several long chains. Wrath Guard's Defending turns into Replying when you are hit so look for that before you continue the chain. You can leave Wrath Guard off and start each chain in the middle if desired, experimentation and experience will build that judgement. A 3m range makes contact easier in mobile situations. Cleave - short blast AoE causing high damage, think of a wedge in front of you 3m long that is narrower near you and a little wider farther away. Expensive in stamina so after two you have a long wait for the third. Facing small groups you may do better with a single Cleave then dealing with each individual one by one with lower stamina solo nukes, see below.
Spear - The quickest way to someone's heart, and the person's behind them too. Great at causing huge amounts of damage to a single target but the AoE is nearly useless as AoE and has very weak control to keep targets around if they don't want to be. A 4m range helps. Terrific at small group burst damage or being a team's finisher. Puncture - a great basic attack with strong damage for the stamina and relatively fast speed for a large weapon. The DoT helps in extended fights or with runners.
Greatclub - The sound of a tree falling in the forest... and landing on your face. A huge weapon with 3m range and matching damage, the attacks are slow, expensive in stamina leading to huge period of inability to act, and highly vulnerable to interruption. Something for more advanced player skill to use effectively this is somewhat an all or nothing situation. When you equip this weapon only one thing is sure: somebody is going down hard. Slug - the fastest attack and your only hope when facing interruption.
Shield - Good roleplay jewelry. Sadly shields don't currently offer any more defense than you can get from the defensive feats on weapons themselves, and you also lose the big secondary offense of your main-hand weapon. There are some great advantages for certain situations. Shield Bash - 100% chance of interrupt and it is very fast, when interrupting is that important.
Longbow - The pointy end goes in the other guy... who is waaay over there. The 35m range of high damage to single targets is the obvious advantage. Keeping your targets at range but not getting away is the challenge. Followthrough Foresight - a good slow for targets that run. Chains with Patient Anchor for situational use against stealthers.
Weapons all have a Base Damage of 40; then gain a bonus +5 damage per minor keyword matched with the feat and +20 damage per matched major keyword. You get one major keyword at Tier 2 and another at Tier 3. When a keyword matches between gear and feat I call it "kp" for keyword points (or keyword power if you prefer) where each minor is 1 kp and majors are 4 kp up to a maximum cap of 12 kp on an attack. Gear tells you what keywords it has at each level of enhancement i.e where Longswords say "grants keywords based on upgrade: Slashing (+0), Sharp (+1), Balanced(+2), Razored (+3)". If you have a starter Steel Longsword that is +0 so it only has Slashing to pair with feats no matter how highly trained they are for 1 kp total. A Steel Longsword +2 has Slashing, Sharp, and Balanced for potentialy 3kp or +15 Base Damage. A Tier 2 Dwarven Steel Longsword +1 has the Masterwork major keyword with Slashing and Sharp minors for 4+1+1= 6 kp or +30 Base Damage. It takes a Tier 3 + 3 weapon with two major and four minor keywords to have the most powerful possible weapon at 12 kp for +60 Base Damage (if your feat is trained to match all of those keywords). Weapon feats gain potential keyword matches in a specific order from rank 1 to rank 6: +0, +1, +2, Tier 2, +3, Tier 3. At rank 4 you can match the T2 major keyword on a weapon but not the +3 minor keyword, you have to train up to rank 5 for that.
Unbreakable - matches best with Pot Steel Plate at Tier 1 (Ornate Steel Plate at Tier 2) and gives just slightly more hp than Dragoon with a very small amount of energy resistance. The most defensive armor. Dragoon - matches best with Hide and Steel Banded armor at Tier 1 (Dwarven Steel Banded at Tier 2) and gives bonuses to light and heavy melee attack and Improved Critical bonuses. Armor that thinks offense is the best defense. Archer - is medium armor that matches best with Soldier's Chainmail at Tier 1 (Captain's Chainmail at Tier 2) and is meant purely for full-time archers. It gives a ranged attack bonus and very small speed bonus. Notes * You need the weapon active in your hand to see the feats in the feat window to slot them in the hotbar. If you know you slotted the weapon on your paper doll and trained feats but can't see them in the feats window, push the green button to the right of the hot bar to swap weapon sets. * Don't start a chain with very low stamina. The set up condition might fall off before you can get the higher stamina finishing feat activated. * It will take 6,000 kills with a weapon before you can train rank 6 of the feat, so the ones with strong AoE will have an easier time with that. * The two most important things about writing a guide are never tell everything you know and
With the recent hiccups of the big map icon vanishing after a death I've started doing a lot of navigating-by-nature, using hex types and hex changes to keep track of where I am as well as the WoT towers which are in the centers of a hex. They're a major landmark I use to navigate with. PoIs are going to be in the center of the hex to. And that's what a "landmark" is, a dominant feature in a geographic area. Just like the docks, farm, hunting lodge or quarry will be the dominant feature in their hex. Instead of the awkwardness of enunciating P-O-I and adding even more abbreviations to an MMO, we could be talking about outposts that are connected to the landmarks. Commoner was just changed so it's a great time to update the term for landmarks too. What does the crowd forge, is it a thing?
We only have to be bothered by feeling grateful for things one day a year. Except the people who had to work all day and even at dinner time on the Day Before Big Sales Day Sales because stock price is more important than people to executives who didn't have to work yesterday.
The war mammoth in the room: Two days is no time at all to make a sale for 95+% of items. Maybe with hundreds of people checking that particular market each day that system would work, but we're not there nor will we be for a dozen or more weeks into EE. All that's happening right now is markets and Abadar credit are solidifying their reputation as functionally useless and THAT label will persist into EE. For as long as sale duration choice stays only two days the player base is going to continue to direct barter for trade and come up with really convoluted Quartermaster systems to collect materials and distribute goods within their social group. Items need an option to stay in the market for at least a week for the system to be viable right now and early EE; up to a month would be a lot better to have ALL items viable for sale at market. And also add depth to the business game choosing how much coin to invest in making the sale of each product in that area.
Encumbrance is a somewhat arbitrary number that quantifies both the weight and bulkiness of each thing we carry, right? So if our armor has encumbrance, that number is accounting for both the weight of the materials and the difficulty of keeping that armor from spilling all over as we lug it around. Then what is causing the percentage penalty? We've already paid the price for the weight and unwieldiness of the armor what else is there to incur further penalty? It can have a straight up encumbrance number that reflects how hard it is to carry around, or do the percentage penalty IN LIEU of encumbrance as an even worse penalty to our ability to haul stuff around. Doing both is double-fining wearers of the two kinds of armor.
This is NOT a company. This is not affiliated with any settlement. This could be a secondary company someday when we get unsponsored extra companies. Money is useless, markets are hit and miss (mostly miss), and we have a lot more materials stockpiled than we're using. It's only a matter of hussling those materials around to whoever can improve them into something more useful. This is an idea to take the place of trade contracts to specific people until we can get those. A network of people who have some things and want to trade them for other things, hopefully building an entente with different members of the collective effort to get raw materials and refined goods to the characters that can use them. I think it could make production a lot easier during Early Enrollment to have that network. These last weeks of alpha are a great time to practice the system and build those connections so they're well-established once everything becomes persistent and we get impatient to do as much as possible as soon as we're able. If there are three people that know you're always looking for beast pelts and keep goods on hand to trade with that they want, it may become difficult to run out of beast pelts. We can work out trades in forums or in-game. No centralized official leadership, and no official charter. It runs the way societies did before money was invented- relationship history, referrals, and personal accountability. Depending on how you feel about another character you may let them walk off with a sack full of your goods with an understanding they'll get something back to you soonish, or whatever arrangements you work out one on one. The penalty if someone makes a habit of breaking those understandings is word gets around and damages their personal reputation so they lose opportunities to trade. Maybe the jilted even go to a bread store and talk about their problems. It's old school.
Thanks for sharing Cheatle! I notice your lack of dwarven representation... :) It's my fault. I see a a dwarf's round little dome so close to the ground, I look at my +2 fence post, and I get these irresistible urges to practice driving golf balls off the top of my mountain. Dwarves ARE Scottish after all. Alternate post: We left Brighthaven with 3 dwarfies, but their little go-sticks had only gotten them to Phoenix Pass by the time of the photo op. Alternate alternate post: We left Brighthaven with 3 dwarfies. Wyverns were circling in the sky outside Kreuz Bernstein feeling a bit peckish, thought they were dour and taciturn rabbits. It's really quite tragic. Old-timey slapstick alternate post: Cheatle is actually two dwarves that stand on each other's shoulders in human size armor. 90s horror alternate post: We brought 3 dwarves with us but you don't see them in the screenshots because they're right behind you! Sci-fi alternate post: Whose chest-image-capture device do you think we used to create such realistic paintings of the event we can send through the internet tubes? That's why all the photos are angled upwards at us.
Ok NewAndius keep your doom and gloom thread hijacking out of my spotlight. You've stated your opinion and why you think that way. Then you did again, and again, and again, and again, and again... Some people did some good things on this day, there were screenshots and t-shirts and much rejoicing. That's what this thread is about. You know the number one reason people give for not playing so much these days? They want persistence. They want MORE of the game not less, and they want to start having lasting affects on the metaphorical and literal landscape. Once the caching issue is resolved that snowball starts rolling down the mountain. And I butt heads, disagree, and point out flaws probably more often than I say nice things about the game so you can't dismiss me with a fanboy label. Just because you occasionally say something smart don't fool yourself into thinking your voice matters any more than the rest of ours. You don't get to hijack threads with your same old recorded message. You add value to the community as the good Bad Guy, that's your role. Next time you want to unravel someone else's thread to inform us how quickly the sky is falling, I suggest you check yourself before you start getting your own nicknames like Rantius and Tedius and your goodbye message is the most +1'd post you ever made. Now shut up and rob somebody.
...because you have to keep reapplying walk). That's not just every time you stop walking. That's ALSO each time you take damage. If you walk three steps and stop, the next time you move you'll be running and presenting Opportunity until the shift toggle can kick in again. If you're walking and someone shoots you with a bow, spell, or melee attack, any damage at all, you're suddenly running and presenting Opportunity again until you press Shift and the toggle can kick in... again. Walking in combat to avoid presenting Opportunity is an untenable strategic choice at the moment. When we toggle Walk on all movement needs to be at non-Opportunity walking speed until we press another toggle button (walk, sprint, or stealth) explicitly choosing as a player to change movement speed.
I love this sort of complex network crafting system. I was a raging industrialist in EVE and will be again in Golarion. It's one of my Top Three reasons I backed the project. Please no mini-games, how does that promote meaningful player interaction anyway? There are already plenty of other tasks for a dedicated crafter between finding sources of inputs and the best places to send finished goods, developing contacts and relationships, visiting markets and talking to settlement representatives looking for goods and new opportunities... Hopefully the xp cost in training is getting close to the sweet spot in the ratio of building attributes with only craft skills:sweet cheese and crackers that's a ridiculous amount of xp. Gathering shouldn't be so expensive it deters adventurers from dabbling, especially as we're bootstrapping the economic cycle and 100% of global capital. The only changes I want to make are small tweaks to make things smoother.
Getting the "19% of units bumped up in quality" plan actually working. It's a next-6-months goal imo but it never has seemed to work as intended and six months after EE refiner's skills will be high enough it really starts affecting them and the economy. Disappear our avatars when we're active in the craft window. To avoid random attacks on crafters who can't see it coming and technically weren't standing outside to be attacked in the first place. If the building comes under siege then it's logical to kick everyone out into the street.
Lee could tell you the guts of it if he wanted but I can tell you a few useful things. Rank 7 - Tier 2 materials
When you get that message, it means you need to increase your harvesting rank before you can extract from that node; the nodes you saw probably need rank 7 to access. And that means trained rank, not final skill after racial and other bonuses. Dwarves get +20? to mining I think, so at rank 6 they'd have 60 + 20 = skill 80 (higher skill value than you get from 7 ranks of mining) but still be unable to access T2 rocks because their rank is too low. "T2 node" doesn't mean there is only T2 material from the drop. At rank 7 and 8 that we can currently train in-game most often you'll get 1-2 units of T1 like always and 1-2 units of T2 on top of that. I get T2 all over so I'm 95% sure we also get T2 materials from nodes that could have been harvested by sub-rank-7 gatherers. It's just that the access value to those nodes was under 7 so everyone can gather from them, but sub-7 will miss out on the T2 materials. At rank 8 I still run across the occasional rock that says I don't have enough skill to harvest anything here (Seems like the T1 and T2 rocks get mined out and replaced with a T3 that no one can mine yet). It just happens a lot less often than the T1/T2 boundary.
Oh Em Gee there is NO Free to Play either, and there never has been. As a subscription model details around the edges can change but "F2P" has a specific context of getting some of the game for free and needing to pay to get full content, or paying to gain a vital in-game resource. Instead of that, GW is planning to let someone else pay your subscription fee for you (and then trade that 30 days of training to you for in-game resources). All accounts have equal access to the full game with no difference between them no matter how much you pay, paying more instead means your account stays active longer. While this means if you have enough in-game resources you can trade them for game time without spending your own real-world money (because someone else did), it is definitely NOT the same beast as the monetezation strategy labeled "free to play". ----------------- Heading the crying off at the pass: Anyone that wants to get enraged about some rich kid being able to buy a lot of goblin balls for instant in-game wealth being unfair advantage and pay to win... you're wrong. It's up to other players how much someone can get for selling goblin balls. It also greatly reduces gold farming and thereby gold farming spam because players have a permitted way to buy gold from other players that actually becomes a part of the in-game economy, eliminating the market to have to put up with gold farmers. Anyone I've ever known that's done it both ways dramatically prefers this method compared to dealing with gold farmers all over.
Daylight Savings time, like summer vacation from school, is an artifact from when most people in North America and Europe were farmers and needed to work their fields 12-16 hours a day at certain times of year, and needed sunlight to do it. In the winter there is much less to be done agriculturally in places where it freezes so it doesn't matter if it gets dark at 5pm and you don't need to pull the kids out of school to help with a gigantic harvest. Heck, we're only using this entire time keeping system in the first place because there are so many of them fancy high-tech railroad trains.
You really, really wanted to take possession of the most poetic bug report award, didn't you? :D Well, you have. Actually I JUST NOW saw that in the Alpha 11 thread, 6 hours and 20 minutes after I posted this. The real story: I've been making poems out of my in-game bug reports for a few weeks because, well, bard, and I was getting tired of writing them so I felt really sorry for the guys that have to go through and read the same dry complaints and false alarms over and over again. I mentioned my encumbrance feat test results in Mumble and how hard it would be to make this bug report rhyme. Someone disbelievingly asked if I make my bug reports rhyme to which I replied, "What, you don't?". They (plural) seemed to have thought I was joking...
I'm increasingly inclined (so inclined I'm writing an email about this in parallel) to see if we can get rid of the queue. A big part of this is due to queued attacks interacting with auto target I think. An alternative is for queued attacks to be canceled whenever the target is dropped; through death or changing target or whatever. That could be done client-side right, so it never interferes with the server's resolution of actions that actually happen? If the combat system was highly responsive I wouldn't mind not having attacks queued. The combat system is NOT highly responsive, that's why the queue exists isn't it? Because trying to throw attack feats at enemies with 300ms this and animation delay that and range tolerance turning into a Marsha in mixed melee-ranged groups without a queue to smooth it out makes combat a staccato hurricane of aggravation or at least so not fun or engaging that most people don't want to bother with it.
I have a bug to report
It's not about teleportation
I trained Encumbrance Bonus 4 today along with both ranks of Strong Back
I can carry more
The smoothness of my
when Strong Back didn't
until I closed and reopened the window for paper doll.
As a last retort
Escalations are neat and could make actually great group events after more work on combat in general and escalation specifics. As a tank a while back I know I had to be prepared for a spike in damage after all the enemies died and I got targeted and focus fired by all the ranged i.e. the entire group. WE REALLY NEED A TARGET WINDOW SO WE CAN SEE *WHAT* WERE TARGETING FROM MORE THAN A DOZEN FEET AWAY Literally the text is unreadable so we don't know what creature type it is. I also can't see any health or state information on ogres in melee (as a human) because his headband is off my screen out of view, another time a target window would be the only source of useful combat information that is currently completely lacking in every fight. Please don't let absence of a target window be "we're being different from other MMOs" because it's denying combat information in as many cases as not (same for readable numbers too). --> Is it possible to alter the growth rate of escalations based on their current size? I'm thinking once it takes root it could quickly jump up to about 30%, slow down a little on it's way to 50% to allow players time to find and scrub it if they want, and post-50% grow to full strength more slowly still. That seems counter intuitive to the momentum of an unchallenged invasion but it would also maybe curb the wall-to-wall 100% escalations we've seen all over after three days because there isn't enough population yet to keep every hex under control every few days. It can obviously be tweaked higher again when the game has greater population density.
Honestly though, after reading your above statements, I question your credentials as a programmer. You may know how to use spreadsheets, but I bet you have barely if ever programmed on a professional level. Slapping garbage together and throwing it out there for sale is not professional. I've been talking to Xeen in PMs about privilege, sexism, and politics for a week. Wouldn't you love to read THAT?
The reason I play less each new build of alpha isn't bugs or lack of X feature, it's because none of what I do is persistent. The game will be going though massive and many currently unknown changes for the next 18 months; there's no knowable Goldilocks spot to aim for that has just the right amount of features to begin EE. Chalk up one more for fix the major gameplay breaking bugs and send us into EE. Gushers and player looting at the top of the list for what to work on after that.
I acknowledge the voices who are warning us about getting flamey and cognitive bias. Remember the core of the OP was that the entire subject is underrepresented so I am less quick to drop this subject than SAD talking circles. Let me thank Paizo for hosting this thread as one more voice to growing the awareness that something is going on, and hopefully foster a curiosity to discover more about it.
Most of those games are targeted at men, because most gamers are men. And THAT sentence is PURE sexism. Now get me on this, you personally are not trying to be prejudiced against women. But you ARE receiving that idea directly from sexism and reinforcing sexism by expressing that gender-assumption as fact. The difference between personal prejudice (the "I have a friend" defense) and systemic sexism is the the major thing that many, many people don't get when talking about equality. The fact is 40-50% of gamers are girls and women, and it's easy to assume more would be if they had a safe and accepting place to be a gamer with real products built for them (not a bow and lipstick slapped onto regular Pac-Man). All about the cash and who it flows from. Nothing else matters. You're also touching on the chicken:egg issue in gaming and entertainment more broadly. Are women not interested in gaming because their ovaries said so, or are they not interested in games built specifically to be looked at by stereotypical hyper-masculine-emulating dudes?
GamerGate and the death threats are turning out to be pretty difficult to explain to non-gamers. "How did accusations of collusion between developers and review Web sites escalate and mutate until a university was threatened with a mass shooting if it allowed a lecture on feminism in gaming to take place?" Truth be told, I can barely follow that chain myself, much less explain it.I think the short answer is, there are some very mentally and emotionally unhealthy people in the world, and some of them are gamers. It is a very tenuous thread that would take a person from healthy human baby to the sort of threats arising in the GamerGate scandal; but it is one that, nevertheless, still seems to form on rare occasion. And in this day of age, it only takes one. Two things. First, it's not so much "rare occasion" as it is "daily". If you're fortunate enough to know a girl gamer, just watch for a while as she tries to play the current widely popular game of the day. Second, the answer to Karl's question is a solid two years of social science courses at least, and honestly makes a great Master's thesis. It is a REALLY complex web of social systems and actions that both give and reinforce specific constructed perceptions about different types of people and a separate notion that it's okay to use any means necessary to preserve and defend those constructs. Of course to the average person all that is like water to a fish - it seems so "natural" that they don't consciously realize it's there, they just exist in it.
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