Urman's page

Monster Hexes are currently stagnant, unlike escalations which can be depleted. Therefore they do produce an infinitely renewable source of resources and PvE content.

(The hex in question was (-5,14), 2 hexes NW of Blackwood Glade. This is a Monster hex, not a Monster Home hex. At the time of the incident, the hex did in fact contain a Mordant Spire escalation.)

I was going to guess Gross Conceptual Errors (whatever those are).

Having been a chat mod elsewhere, I'd say that GW could save their moderator team lots of pain and suffering with built-in moderation tools. At a minimum I'd suggest the ability for a mod to right click on the offending chat entry, then flag it (capture for future action by a GM or for building a case against a user) or select from a menu of punishment options (like mute, -500 Rep, flagged as Jerk for free PvP, whatever). All of these actions, flagging or punishing, would be logged so GW can likewise review the moderator's patterns of behavior and possible favoritism.

Accounts aren't free (well - except trial accounts) so the flagging operation could capture the account name as well as the character name, to show a pattern when people are using their alts just to be obnoxious in chat. A counter of violations on an account could also be used to steer the mods and GMs to more or less severe actions. Trial accounts could also be identified to the mods by the system - they are likely to be commonly be used for offensive purposes and it might be in GW's interest to note which paying customer is bringing in the jerk squad. ("No trial account tickets for you. It's not worth dealing with your friends!")

One blog that talked of laws and crime was Alignment and Reputation. How much of that makes it into the game, and how quickly, remains to be seen.

For clarification, breaking a law will (was to?) flag the character as Criminal; the Criminal would be a legitimate/legal target. It will also shift active alignment a bit towards Chaos.

Settlements that fail to enforce their laws - that is, fail to kill flagged Criminals - will suffer Corruption, an inefficiency in collecting taxes. Reading between the lines, settlements are warned not to pass actual laws that they cannot enforce.

Reputation does not tie to Criminal actions in that blog; Rep is reserved as a penalty mostly for attacking or killing unflagged characters

I think pushing crowdforging to the level of demands risks GW having to shut down the crowdforging concept. If it's bad with a few hundred players active in the forums, it will likely be unusable with a few thousand. GW cannot develop fast enough to meet players' insistent expectations (which can change every week) and may have to just say "this is not working" and pull the plug on our crowdforging.

I will not reveal any of my names.

SO if you're not using Bluddwolf, do you mind if I use it? I can't imagine we'll be able to block names forever if we don't use them.

I checked the name - no one is using it yet (well, except me but I'll delete that character in the next hour before server down-time.) My rendition of Bluddwolf is a big guy, violet eyes, blond mullet, and big eye brows.

I've deleted the character, but it's a fine Golarian name and will eventually be used.

(minor edits)

Is it an issue with divine points, or with focus expert? I thought the original complaint was that the only way to get focus expert was with kills?

Fiery Wind is best, when he's on.

Perhaps the orison trainers simply expect their students to be seriously competent with a battle focus, and kill-counts is an easy way to establish that you won't put someone's eye out with the focus, flailing around in a classroom envisonment.

In some future Golarian world, the battle focuses will have LED displays that show how many times they have been used, so the trainers can admit or refuse students based on some other metric, but for now, kill-counts is what they use.

And I don't think you need to kill thousands of foes right away. 1250 for focus expert 7, as a gate for Lv4 orisons, at week 3 or 4 in game?

There's an argument that any player with a week in game can probably narrow his location down to a fraction of a hex (I'm at 6 o'clock in hex -01.04, 1/3 the way out from center). Since it's pretty easy for us to figure out our own location, and trivially easy to use voice-chat to report it to our party... It might stand to reason that the game should do that for us, and we can focus on the fun parts.

I do hope that at some point there is a achievement track for non-damaging orisons. It might take a lot more casts than kills, because of the risk, and because each kill probably represents multiple casts. But it's EE. We maybe should crowdforge/clamor for such a thing.

With sound. Klaxon-like or an air-raid siren noise.

I'm figuring that at some point the art will change, we'll have more options, and my character might be able to get a haircut someplace.

The clerics in the groups I've been playing in have done a bang-up job of matching vectors with running tanks (and fleeing archers like me) and spamming heals on the run. Extending their range a little would mean less failed casts, but I *know* there are clerics out there who are healing their parties with existing mechanics.

Today we dealt with two escalations near Brighthaven. Both were charred tribe goblins. The first started at near 30%, the second started at close to 40%. With two teams of 6 adventurers, we were able to clear the escalations in about 2 1/2 hours total.

It seemed pretty easy - but one of my teammates pointed out that we had been promised special escalations at the start of EE. These escalations started at a couple thousand points, compared to tens of thousands of points that we saw in Alpha.

So: escalations are very doable at this point, for settlements that plan on keeping their escalations under control.

Is the goal to get Divine Points or points with the focus?

If I was running a cleric and needed Divine Points, I'd party up with everybody and anybody doing escalations in skeleton or cultist areas. Everybody in a party gets credit for party creature kills - it doesn't matter what implement is used to get the kill.

Edit to add:

Yesterday I got to Focus 7, and Gob slayer 8 with other weapons. I had planned to continue that path today.

Focus 7 is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 28 Divine Points. That's more than sufficient to learn Rank 4 orisons, which you might be ready to purchase in week 3 or 4 of the game. Like Ryan suggests below, you're probably grinding a lot more than you need to.

Very nice; very useful. I have it bookmarked now.

Yup. Forestry includes all of those wonderful herbs the Apocs need.

23 minutes here. Ah well.

The Dev spreadsheets ("Copy of PFO Wiki - Official Data") were updated as recently as 6 December. I don't think anything has changed since then as far as xp costs/attribute gains.

link to shared folders

Bluddwolf wrote:

Player looting will make this practice obsolete. If I were to spot on obvious bot, I'd come back in about an hour, kill it, and loot the spoils. The rep loss will be worth the fun of looting and the tears of the botter, having wasted all that time.

Unless your settlement has an arrangement to use this exploit to create a goods factory willing to be murdered and looted. Good money, easy to make. this would be the suicide ganker in a Catalyst in EVE. Cheap to make, create loads of low level goods, be willing to die. something any noob could do.

I like the idea of the botters being seen as goods factories. Someone could make a fortune renting out the bot placement locations and protecting them from raiders. Or demanding protection money. Same thing.

The server downtime is normally 9 am Pacific Time - 2 hours from now. There will be a new client at that time, and we can log on to EE after setting that up. There was some level of support in the 2d kickstarter that was tied to Early Enrollment (not sure what level - I only supported KS1 and wasn't automatically eligible for Early Enrollment).

A good blog, I think. Hopefully it will reduce some of the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Right now the only drain is fees at the auction house. In the future we can potentially have more drains as needed like drains on crafting, drains on training, etc.

Will there be upkeep on Inns and Smallholdings at some point? (Follow-up: When?)

Except for the little detail that monster AI doesn't work that way in PFO. The monsters will focus on you until you are dead or they decide they can't harm you enough, and then they return to their start location. They don't turn and attack someone else who isn't attacking them. And the bot - if set up like Kero's mouse bot - doesn't attack mobs you drag in.

In the meantime, you've significantly degraded the experience of honest players.

I dunno. I've played a crafter character throughout the Alphas, generally spending minimal amounts on combat skills. I've killed lots of Lv1 mobs and found tons of recipes wandering the map. I think the play experience of grinding mobs on the perimeter of the starter town isn't significantly better than searching them out a few hexes away.

If the purpose of the goblins around the starter towns is to complete the starter quests, then there's no particular reason that those mobs can't be a special Lv1 goblin with junk drops. I'd go so far as to recommend that they drop *mostly* starter gear, and even then maybe only a small fraction of total kills. No recipes, minimal coin. Starter gear means periodic heavy drops, so the character has to cycle back to the bank frequently. I think that changing the loot tables for starter town goblins would not significantly degrade the experience of honest players.

I think the goblins around the starter town have the same loot tables as goblins elsewhere. I'm not sure that we want all goblins, everywhere, to have their loot tables gutted. The problem with the starter-town goblins is the predictability of their location and the very rapid respawn rate. Having said that, I'm sure clever people will be able to bot them elsewhere.

Another 'sandbox' player driven solution: Just cast something with knockback on him until he's out of range of the goblin's aggro.

Heh. Now I'm going to have to get an attack with a knockback and go looking for Doc. ;)

And yeah if I see someone standing in one spot in one of the four starter areas farming goblins I will personally kill them and their macro will autotarget the Thornguards and ruin their character permanently. Isn't that an acceptable safeguard?

The way he explained the macro set-up, the character doesn't choose targets and attack them. It autotargets whatever attacks it - and the Thornguards won't attack him unless he's super low rep.

It would be curious to see though - I think you might be able to atttack it once, then set out of range until you are no longer a flagged attacker. Then step back into range and let him kill you for rep loss. But he's got an [ESC] in the sequence - so he might not remember targets for 2 minutes.

It's not like say Wurm where it is both profitable and enjoyable to log on and do nothing but blacksmithing all day or Mortal where you can experiment with your recipes to get exactally the properties you want.

Having played long enough in Wurm to get a skill 90+ miner and 75+ blacksmith... it was fun the first time around, but I hope to never have to do it again.

"Stand in the door!"

There is also a possibility that if you ever delete the designated DT, you will lose the feature. I anticipate there will be significant blowback if that comes to be, as it is strongly at odds with the word "forever" in the kickstarter.

I think the technical solution for this could be as simple as having no delete button for such characters.

Another very common fantasy trope is the hero only gets to die once.

Some might say that an unlimited number of resurrections is silly and immersion breaking. That's their opinion; Goblinworks seems to think that unlimited resurrections is importantant for the game design; game design being some balance of fun and meaningful.

What Pharasma giveth, Pharasma can taketh away. I'd be ok with characters holding onto whatever skills they have... up to the point of their death. So if you get kicked out of your town (or lose your town), Pharasma generously gives you one month to be a social animal and find your character a new town or retake your old one. After 1 month, though, at the next resurrection, the character suffers the full impact of not having town support. The rootless hero can avoid Pharasma's cold grasp at his skills as long as he can stay alive.

Just making sure - the settlement that posts the most screen shots of a completed crafted item of +1 or better wins? Sounds like a lot of screen shots.

I tried to patch at about 9:45 Pacific, but didn't try to get into the game when the patcher didn't find anything new. I tried the patcher again at maybe 11 and it started patching then.

I think the bombers have both a knockback and spin, from the concussive bomb. Shaman also have a knockback effect.

In my experience, the knockback isn't too bad if you're close when it goes off. With one shaman or bomber I can sprint in, get knocked back just a little, and kill the gob with a spear exploit followed by a jab before their second attack fires at me. I imagine someone with a good AOE could take out a couple that way.

Rumor has it that the bombers will engage at 25m, while most mobs agro at 20m. I find it helpful to *not* zoom all the way out on the minimap - my minimap is about halfway zoomed and I can keep my distance from the goblins as I pass.

Yeah, sticky stuff counts as adhesive I think, there is also smelly stuff.

Fanon: the names of the goblin bags indicate what's inside them; there are 8 bag types. In the tale Princess Snaggletooth and the Eight Goblins, the Goblins are named Itchy, Smelly, Sticky, Fiery, Dreamy, Healthy, Dangerous, and Bitter. Coincidence?

I haven't played Pathfinder, but when I played AD&D it was assumed that our characters were contantly training and honing their skills during downtime between adventures. If a player said, "Hey, my character is training between adventures and should get pluses to his attacks," the GM would look at him and coolly say, "That's nice, but constant training is assumed. If you ever decide to stop training, let me know and we'll assign penalties to your attacks."

In PFO I assume Tier 1 capabilities are pretty mundane. A character can maintain his training regime without a lot of gear (so even with access to just an NPC settlement). At Tier 2 and 3, though, those constantly training characters have better trainers, better training gear, the best adventurer training diets, etc., etc. And all those advanced trainers with their fancy training gear and elaborate training regimes all have standards of what kind of town they want to live in: it's not something downstream of Rotters' Hole.

If some group ties up 100 accounts locking down a hex that means they aren't doing things in other places.

After the first week or two, cooldowns are likely less important. We never lose xp, so it won't be difficult to plan ahead, leave one settlement at the end of a game session, stay out of the game for say 24 hours, then log back in and join the new settlement and immediately buy training. Same with companies.

Is there a risk of being impaired for the the time between settlements, if my settlement/company needs aid? Sure. Which just means that I'll plan ahead and make sure I don't switch at the same time everyone else is switching. And I won't switch terribly frequently.

The Fine Print

There are two key elements not yet in the game that will make a big difference to Subterfuge users. Per the tabletop game everyone should be entering combat Flat-Footed unless they have Uncanny Dodge; since that is a very prominent state for Subterfuge attacks and reactives it will make a big difference. Second, sneak attack damage is a major factor from Rogue Feature feats that is not implemented in the game yet.

I'm not sure of this, but I think sneak attack damage from Rogue feats like Opportunist is actually in the game. When I have Opportunist slotted and I'm attacking targets that give me opportunity, I do +25 damage over my normal opportunity exploit attacks (with spear, so it might mean +10 damage * attack's damage factor).

It still doesn't make sense. If Joe is flagged as an Attacker (or Criminal, Heinous, whatever), then I should be able to attack him and not lose Rep. If I have to kill him 10 times to drive him away from my village, and he's flagged each time, then those were 10 responsive attacks, not aggressive PKing. I shouldn't gain a murderer tag.

I suspect/hope that the attacker flags and murderer tags are in a simple form now, for MVP, and will be cleaned up later.

You can begin using your game time when Early Enrollment begins. You can use that time sequentially, or you can play a month, put your account in suspension, and then play later. While your account is suspended your characters will not earn XP.

Early Enrollment is just like Open Enrollment in that you have to pay to play each month.

So question: Why don't Refining Achievements go up to +5? If they did that like Crafting Achievements did, then the point deficit at the end of the day would only be 3 Points.

The devs have already thought that through. They explained it somewhere, but I don't care to search.

We refiners create +4 and +5 goods only through random chance. If there was the possibility of gaining +5 crafting points for getting a lucky roll and the possibility of getting an additional +6 crafting points for getting a very lucky roll, then the economy would shift to putting a premium on raw materials. We'd basically have the same messed up situation like the crafting in themeparks, where raw materials are precious and refined goods are junk. There would be a huge glut of cheap +3 refined goods in the market from the refiners' failed attempts at making a +4 or +5.

edit to add: As a refiner, I see no problem at all with getting to Lv20 with the new/current crafting achievement points rules. I'll get some while cross-training other refining skills (which I need for attributes) and get other points from some crafting.

What do Freeholders do at the Holdings?

It depends on the holding. Freeholders are specialized gatherers and refiners. While they might not yet be PF canon, I'd offer that they may have similarities with miners in medieval Europe. (As I recall:) Miners were generally protected by the local kings or other high nobility, and were sometimes not subject to the local authority (baron). Miners were 'free', but unlike free farmers (yeomen), they didn't owe military service. They were frankly too valuable to the high nobles.

I think there is an implied feudal relationship. Companies hold hexes/holdings, settlements don't. If the company is a sponsored company, then the holding can be attached to the sponsoring settlement. If the company isn't a sponsored company, or they choose not to attach it to a settlement, then it's an independent holding.

I've logged my character Winter on at the bank, recovering Rep. I'm likely doing other things today, but she can increase the character count by one.

I wish we had floating names in real life...

I spent some time in the Army. Nametags on everyone.

I think so. But then, I thought so that last time we had a "discussion" about this.

Guurzak: Crowdsource a better name for "PoI"

Ya, I thought "Holding" did pretty well in that thread.

I'll move a character to RH, to have it there for any weekend events.