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"Capped at Level 15" is a lot better off than just looking at that number relative to 20 might seem: By my estimation* it includes proficiencies at rank 3 out of 3, attacks at rank 6 out of 6, armor feats to rank 10 out of 11, expendables to level 8, utilities to rank 4 out of 6(these seem the most-restricted, actually), hit points to 16 out of 20 (need specifically martial points anyways to train past 15 anyway) and power to 32 out of 40, reactives and defensives to rank 4, and class features to rank 8 out of 11. (*There are relatively few feats that have a hard level requirement in the advancement tables, mostly the class features - I am approximating the others by using the measures of 87 role achievement points and/or attribute requirement of 20, based on those requirements in the features advancement tables.) Honestly, I expect plenty of characters to effectively self-cap at ~15 because the advancement beyond that doesn't particularly give much benefit for the xp spent. It's not even clear yet how easily a settlement will be able to train past level 15, I suspect many settlements will not offer such training either, considering the cost/benefit. So all things considered, 15 isn't much of a cap at all; but I guess Bluddwolf wasn't aware of all the implications when he made his suggestion.
We already realize the reputation system matters less as your levels get higher. Eventually max level characters will be able to function without any concern for reputation. Not (if I understand the design intent correctly) if they fall below their settlement's reputation threshold for citizenship; but that area of the design is not terribly clear (to me).
Exactly, just seemed like the right LE thing to do. Clearly mark thier territory, state thier intent to hold it and kill any trespassers, account for future "natural growth", and let all players know where the "hot zone" is.I am wondering why the Golgothians were not the first to put lines on a map and declare "this land is ours" I disagree. Lawful Evil may follow the rules, but that doesn't mean they like rules for their own sake: Rules are to be used cleverly from a position of weakness to leverage advantage, and from a position of strength to reinforce that strength. Creating laws that limit oneself (like defining the extent of one's own territory) without giving advantage (they already kill who they want, both inside or outside "their territory", however ambiguously that is defined) would be self-weakening, from a LE perspective.
Tyncale, there's no question in anyone's mind that predators need prey. My question is, how many of those who are currently playing primarily as prey are prepared to step into the role of predator? I don't consider myself to be "currently playing primarily as prey", but I will raise my hand and say I'd be willing to step into the role of predator should the game be lacking. That's not to say I would replicate Xeilias' methods, though.
I have heard of one company composed entirely of one person's alts, numbering more than 20. That company is not part of either EBA or EoX; it's certain that every or nearly every settlement suffers from alt inflation to some degree, and I sincerely doubt that any one group suffers disproportionately. And, like you, I look forward to influence and DI that will at least somewhat reflect actual playing people.
138 hexes is accurate. By my own count (not counting "half-hexes", which are actually walled off in the game), there's a total of ~798 (memory is a bit hazy) hexes. I think Lee Hammock quoted a number in the 800s in his recent video interview. For the mathematically declined, using those figures, this is roughly a claim on ~17% of the total map area.
4 faves for a pun.
In the future we'll have territorial control and trespassing laws for those areas under long-term ownership. But for hexes like Monster Hexes that (as I understand it) will never be controlled in that fashion, how about a means of staking a temporary (until downtime?) claim, as a means of creating essentially a temporary PvP hex? A settlement having a claim on a hex would make anyone else (not allied) automatically red to them within that hex, and vice versa - the claiming settlement would be red to anyone else. Multiple settlements could make claims to the same hex. In the short term, allow a settlement a limited number of daily claim based on held towers. In the long term, staking a claim could cost a relatively small amount of DI/resources. A "successful claim" should probably have some kind of benefit for the claiming settlement over time - whether that's an increase in gathering/drops within the hex for settlement members (but not allies) or - in the future - some kind of per-hour income to the settlement or something along those lines, so that if someone claims a hex and nobody shows up to contest it then you still get something out of it. On the flipside there would need to be a way of contesting (through PvP) a claim and denying the claiming settlement those benefits - perhaps the claim is manifested by an in-game object that needs to be defended, e.g. a capture radius similar to a tower (but without the massive art asset needing to be placed carefully on the map). An existing competing claim by another settlement would block any settlement from gaining the benefits. Key advantages: * The number of (rep-free) aggressor settlements for the random player is limited to those settlements wishing to stake claims in a hex
Yes, but when we "spend" our rep, it takes MUCH longer to get it back. For instance, after one good pvp night at "Usties" I'm not able to participate in "unsactioned" pvp for pretty much the rest of the week. So you get the added danger once a week maybe 2-3 at most if other groups are involved. that's less then half the time of a raised danger level. But there are many possible attackers for any one group of targets. If it's possible for a single small group of attackers to continually harrass a hex all week, then that throws the risk:reward out the window when there's several groups looking to do the same.
Also remember that most lower levels are terrible for stat bumps. It might be xp-cheaper to take a 4 or 5 in something you'll never use than several things to levels 1-3 that you'd rarely use. Actually the lowest levels are the most efficient in terms of stat-per-xp, it's just that they don't take much xp to learn, so the magnitudes of their stat bumps are very small.
All I'd ask people to compare is the risk to reward ratio, and to judge for themselves (as new arrivals with nothing to hide or be defensive about and with dev permission to exploit-ish) whether they'd have bug reported Ustalavs within minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months of hunting there. I haven't fought a single Ustalav because as soon as the ease/brokenness/bugginess was mentioned on comms I felt bound by the TOS to "don't do that thing". I see. I'll stop trying to discuss with you something you have no first-hand knowledge of, then.
I think the real question is: If you knew this happened with regularity in a specific area would you intentionally go back there and take advantage of it? And if you needed to kill those mobs (and their bigger, meaner spawn-mates) anyways for a quest/specific salvage/achievement/etc, would you put off doing those things, or fight other stuff that's much less efficient/more dangerous, in order to avoid a minority of buggy mobs? "Taking advantage" is an intent, and there's plenty of other reasons why one might want to fight a particular group of mobs that has nothing to do with AI problems.
All I'd ask people to compare is the risk to reward ratio, and to judge for themselves (as new arrivals with nothing to hide or be defensive about and with dev permission to exploit-ish) whether they'd have bug reported Ustalavs within minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months of hunting there. As I'm sure you're aware, many of the forum population will judge based on the forums alone, and not bother to go and see for themselves in game. I'm just trying to provide more complete information for comparison on the forums. There's many AI problems. If mobs get stuck pathing to you, would you just shoot them down from a distance anyway or do you run away to reset them so they behave correctly? If you pull a mob in a big group and it doesn't aggro the rest of them when you know it normally should, do you reset and try again until you get the proper response, or do you just kill the one mob?
When the Mordant Spire respawns somewhere everyone will be able to visit them, and I welcome other players to fight Mordant Spire in T1 gear (especially with 70,000 xp characters) and compare the 2 experiences. Not really a fair comparison. It's worth noting that the Mordant Spire mobs are significantly higher level on average than the Ustalav ones - Ustalav escalations have many white/yellow/red mobs mixed in with some purples, Mordant Spire has only a handful of reds and mostly purples. That difference alone makes Ustalav way better for farming in Tier 1 gear than Mordant Spire, regardless of any AI differences. Even if the Ustalav casters were changed today, for Tier 1-equipped groups it would still be way better (easier/better risk-reward ratio) to fight Ustalav than Mordant Spire.
Yes, it is. Lots of people are "negatively affected" by stuff not in the game. Some people want to play classes that aren't implemented. Some people want to run dungeons that don't exist yet. Some people want to engage in formation combat, assassination, market manipulation, caravans, and dozens of other features which are not in the game yet.And if somebody doesn't get to train their character past level 8 because a *few* other players don't like them, is that OK? If the social compact existing within PFO, being critical to the functioning of the whole system, is to have any meaning at all, then yes, that's OK. Maybe that somebody should ask themselves why "a few other players don't like them" and how they managed to get themselves into such a situation for no gain.
A temporary problem; those mechanisms will exist in the future. We are still very early on in the development of PFO.Indeed, and yet we can be negatively affected by those circumstances, right. now. is that OK? Yes, it is. Lots of people are "negatively affected" by stuff not in the game. Some people want to play classes that aren't implemented. Some people want to run dungeons that don't exist yet. Some people want to engage in formation combat, assassination, market manipulation, caravans, and dozens of other features which are not in the game yet.
If players could simply train anywhere to advanced levels, then what real incentive is there for said players to (a) put themselves at indirect risk by affiliation with a settlement, (b) behave within the strictures established by said settlement (which are related to the larger inter-settlement politics) for the purposes of staying in good standing therein, and (c) protect the settlement itself when it is threatened? My understanding is that it's because PFO aims to involve everyone in settlement-level conflicts, not a small minority of "hardcore nullsec" players. It also makes wars more meaningful, rather than "oh let's just dock up until they get bored and go away". And it also prevents the bank-rolling of unaffiliated (by choice or by consequence) actors since they won't be able to make effective use of good gear without having that training. Bottom line, it is intended to make settlement membership the most important decision you make for your character.
I think the reason training is restricted to settlement members is to encourage players to join settlements and play within the social/political framework of settlements. If players could simply train anywhere to advanced levels, then what real incentive is there for said players to (a) put themselves at indirect risk by affiliation with a settlement, (b) behave within the strictures established by said settlement (which are related to the larger inter-settlement politics) for the purposes of staying in good standing therein, and (c) protect the settlement itself when it is threatened?
I think those kinds of uses would be better served with a Contracts system rather than hijacking the Auction House (which would badly skew any Auction House statistics, for those who like market analysis).
Oh it is too late to read any of that... That's too bad, it's really quite fascinating.
For those interested in the whole sordid story rather than a tiny curated fraction of it, Here is Realmwalker's original post a good ways through the very large and already-heated thread.
While I'll say the FUN is almost purely PvP, it seems one could ignore it and PvE endlessly. Well, you COULD do PvE endlessly at the moment, but once you have enough resources, enough recipes, enough gear, it loses a lot of its relevance to the bigger picture. Just like, given a steady supply of gear, you could just PvP endlessly with a willing opponent for no purpose - but both of those on their own (in their current form) would be boring after a few weeks, IMO. The sum of the two is greater than the whole. The fact that everything having any relation to PvP has to be couched into the realm of meaningful or purposeful or indirectly consensual (by activity) shows that the development of this game has been firmly directed away from "PvP-centric" and gradually more towards "I-Don't-Like-PvP" friendly. The game needs both PvP'ers and PvE'ers in order to function as envisioned. Hostility from "extremists" directed at the other end of the spectrum is counter-productive.
If you logged in for the first time on the last day of the first month, you'd get backdated XP to the start of Early Enrollment, and your first month of game time would expire 30 days after your first login. So yes, if you time it right, you could get effectively 2 months -1 day of XP for 1 month's game time. Thanks for that clarification, Ryan.
The way I see it, you are effectively paying for xp/training time, not play time. Backdated xp would therefore also mean backdated subscription usage, and that seems to me the most fair way to do things (both to those who could not join in on day 1 of EE, and to those who could/did).
I thought that the deal with backdated XP was that you're charged time from your months starting at zero-hour, not based on your actual starting time if you start in the first month. So the timing it to get a free month isn't actually a thing. Or am I wrong there? You are correct.
Let's say all your appropriate features are rank 4 and you want more of that stat. It's more efficient to train unwanted armor skills to 3 than to take a 5th rank of an unwanted feature, but you have no way to know that looking at your tables without doing more math. I have an extremely raw spreadsheet that does these calculations (finds the "xp per attribute point" of every level of every skill), if it really interests you. The numbers, however, are not very user-friendly (not to mention subject to rounding errors due to lack of precision in the source data) and it probably needs some added context to be able to make sense of it at a glance - it doesn't even show you *which* attribute(s) are being gained. Maybe cumulative (from level 1) totals of xp spent and attribute points gained? But that wouldn't easily help you in answering "is raising skill X from 5 to 6 better than raising skill Y from 2 to 4". TL;DR The data is there, figuring out a reasonable way to present it that is useful for decision-making is stumping me.
It's not clear to me at the moment whether Freedom and Mind Blank will help you resist such effects in the first place. The answer may lie in Combat Guide, but I don't have a convenient copy on hand at the moment to check. Shrug Off (and there are other things I didn't list that apply Shrug Off as well) is definitely an after-the-fact remedy, it removes a small number (apparently equal to your recovery, i.e. 10+ appropriate recovery bonus, see link below) of stacks of physical debuffs, like Slows, Bleeding, and Reflex penalties. Some older information suggests that only one kind of stack is affected per use, and that timed debuffs can also be reduced in duration as well, but I can't confirm whether that matches in-game behaviour or not as my testing hasn't been that extensive.
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