Urman's page

In the early days of the Marked in the River Kingdoms, there is little use for coin. Many of the adventurers choose to hoard their coin against the future and rely on barter instead. The settlement of Keepers Pass, in the southeast, is becoming a crafting and trading center for the many settlements in the area.

In the interest of encouraging travelers to come to Keepers Pass to trade, some crafter and traders will offer a selection of goods for a fixed price, priced in bartered goods. If you wish to sell goods on a recurring basis in Keepers Pass, for coin or barter, feel free to list your wares below.

In the absence of a trade channel/forum section, I'll be making posts prefixed with "Trade Channel:" so other traders and crafters can quickly spot them. I'll encourage others to do the same - I hold no claim to the prefix :) Feel free to add your own trade questions to the thread - that's totally on-topic in my view.

Short questions:
What should haul be worth? For example, if I want to move 100 iron ore (50 enc) from Kruez Bernstein to Keeper's Pass (11-12 hexes depending on pathing), what should I be paying? Coin or a % of the haul?

Should haul loads be close to 40 encumbrance, or would haulers be fine at 125% of basic encumbrance?

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.

The Golden Scales is a company focused on refining and crafting. We will be based in and sponsored by Brighthaven, in the mountains 12 hexes SSE of Thornkeep. We will be the first in-house crafting company for The Empyrean Order (TEO). Brighthaven and TEO are NG, so a good or true neutral alignment will be required of all members.

We are looking for characters that are planning on putting anywhere from 50 to 90% of their training time towards refining or crafting, with a goal of reaching Tier 2 in one skill quickly, and reaching Tier 3 eventually. We'd encourage characters planning on a lesser amount on crafting focus to join the Empyrean Order's fighting companies; we will still have plenty of contact with (read: work for) the gatherers, crafters, and refiners in our sister companies.

We are seeking all types of crafters, but Brighthaven itself will be geared towards Fighters and Clerics in the first months of Early Enrollment. We do have allied settlements close by: Keepers Pass, Phaeros, Blackwood Glade, Hammerfall, and RiverBank, so all our crafters will have access to those trainers and workshops and markets. The refining buildings we expect in town include smelter, geologist (gemcutter), arcanist workshop (sage), and apothecary. The crafting buildings include armorsmith, weaponsmith, jeweler, and iconographer. Despite not having all of the buildings in our settlement in the beginning of EE, we still will have need of crafters from the other vocational paths, such as tanners, weavers, leatherworkers, bowyers... We'll find space for any crafter, and dedicated gatherers as well.

The Golden Scales will be a subsidiary member of TEO; all members of the Scales will also be members of TEO and by extension, the out-of-game organization Covenant of the Phoenix (CotP). The Scales, TEO, and CotP are all dedicated to having a close knit community, with a family-appropriate atmosphere. While we intend to be competitive, we recognize that real-life has priority over the game-life, and that gaming is supposed to be fun.

For more information, contact our "Master of Scales", FieryWind.

Just did a little testing on this today - my second character has Smelting 3 and was able to run jobs with his crafting queue. He has not gained any xp since the Alpha 9 patch. Rather than just doing a bug report I decided to raise it here, just to make sure we're all playing by the same rules.

If the intent is that these characters are able to craft, I'd like to know so that I can spend appropriate amount of xp training up my alts (to craft in the background, if I decide that would be efficient). On the other hand, if these characters are not supposed to be crafting (or adding to settlement construction queues), will their ability to do so be blocked once EE starts?

Running a refiner character, I'm not sure how this will affect people's builds, but I was somewhat inspired by the thread Divine Achievements from Escalations

There are fewer sources of Arcane achievements than for other roles. Something that seems curious to me is the gathering of essences of shimmering nodes. If a character isn't a magic user or at least have some magical ability, how is he or she gathering magical energy? I'd offer the following changes:

1. Gathering essences from shimmering nodes should be a magical skill. The achievements should be Arcane Achievements rather than Adventure Achievements.

2. Turning essences into crystals should likewise be a magical skill, as it heavily involves handling that raw magic. The sage achievements should therefore be Arcane Achievements rather than Crafting Achievements.

Using the refined crystals can remain crafting, as it doesn't deal with raw magic. (This also gets around the problems that Artificiers and Iconographers deal with a lot of things besides crystals).

Soon we will enter EE and see the creation of the first companies of player characters and the War of the Towers (WoT). Many of the companies that will be formed in the early days of the game will be created to compete in WoT, and after that is over the companies will go on to some other part of the game, performing a role which might not match the name chosen at the beginning of WoT. Likewise as people enter and leave the game, company leadership will change, company goals will change, and companies names should also probably change.

Proposal 1: Companies should be able to change their name as the game progresses. Name changes don't need to be free; some Influence cost might be appropriate to capture the loss of name-recognition the company has gained over time.

Proposal 2: To make it possible to track companies that change their name to hide their past, a company's lineage - the list of all of the names the company has had - should be stored and should be knowable for characters with appropriate skills (Bard/Aristocrat skills). Optionally, the lineage might go back only a certain number of names or a certain amount of time.

Proposal 3: Company naming convention could allow multiple companies to have the same name, provided the name is only used by one sponsored company in a settlement. The basic naming convention could be $Company of $Settlement. So it could be possible to have two companies named "The Housecarls", but they would formally be "The Housecarls of Bigtown" and "The Housecarls of Littleburg". Of course, when that Littleburg company goes to join Bigtown, they'll have to change their name. I think such a naming convention might reduce problems creating lore-acceptable company names. (This last proposal is probably not time-sensitive and could be implemented in OE.)

Elsewhere there are discussions of whether some wilderness hexes might be open for FFA PvP. This turns it around: settlements might actually want their own hexes to be FFA PvP so they can engage interlopers without alignment or reputation shifts.

Under normal engagement rules, an unaligned character belonging to no settlement or company can enter a settlement's hex or its claimed hexes for any purpose. The unaligned character might be there to spy, or to harvest from the settlement's nodes, or to otherwise cause problems. The members of the settlement face alignment or reputation losses in driving such interlopers off.

If settlements were able to set their entire territory as FFA, there could be limitations. The FFA status would not be switchable on and off, so it can't be used to catch the unaware and bypass the Alignment and Reputation system that way. It would be active full time, 24/7. It would also be usable by anyone; the settlement members would be free of alignment and reputation consequences in attacking, but so would any interlopers, for balance. And it would only apply to the settlement and those PoI hexes it held though sponsored companies.

Would this be a reasonable exception to the normal alignment and reputation system?

One of the questions regarding alignment is how does a character who has an evil core and active alignment make a major game change and seek redemption; forsake the monster he is and turn towards a good alignment.

Factions might allow major changes to core alignment that would be rare, difficult and hard to game. Not all factions would need to offer the change to core alignment, but most religious factions probably would, allowing a player to rededicate her life with membership in the faction. It would require some modification of the factions as we understand them.

1. The character would be joining a faction without meeting the alignment restrictions. The character could start at (new) Rank 0, and only advance to Rank 1 when all other membership requirements are met. There may be costs involved, or other restrictions. For example, while the character is at Rank 0, he might not be able to join or advance in any other faction. He may be limited to vows of poverty, etc., if that kind of thing could be implemented.

2. Upon gaining Rank 0, the character's core alignment is reset to the faction's alignment. If he belongs to other factions that require a different core alignment, he is considered lapsed and is no longer eligible for benefits of those memberships. A character can rejoin such a faction in time, if he later meets the membership restrictions.

3. If he was an active member of a faction that is an enemy of his new faction, he may be considered an apostate in his old faction. If so, he is flagged as hostile to members of his old faction for some time (2 weeks per rank held?). A character can never rejoin a faction after he has rejected it through apostasy.

4. A character can only seek redemption in new factions, not those he belongs to, even in lapsed status. Factions have long memories, and will not be there for you in the future if you reject them.

The redemption process would be limited, with each character only able to be redeemed a limited number of times without alienating all factions. It might have any number of restrictions on the Rank 0 members, as they wait for the core alignment to slowly correct the active alignment. And rejecting past faction allies may lead to revenge for apostates, depending how forgiving that faction is.

Caravans will start as ad hoc collections of characters, and iterate to ad hoc collections of characters and vehicles hauling stuff. Crowdforging will determine if and how more resources are allocated to systems related to caravans. But the initial design is one character with pockets full of stuff running through the wilderness trying to get from A to B often enough to show a profit.

4-legged critters are part of a future milestone. :-)

I mentioned it elsewhere, but will break it out in this new thread to discuss possible mechanics of pack mules. Mules and other pack animals could extend player capabilities as merchants or could be used to haul bulk cargoes more effectively. I think they could be a good first step for cargo hauling because you don't need a working cart model and a working animal model. You just need an animal model. You don't even need riding animations or mounted combat rules because it's just a pack animal.

The intent of this thread is to gather in one place those methods that could be used to game (or are perceived to game) the reputation system in PFO.

1. Buying, selling, and manipulating reputation gifts. Early indications were that a person could gift some of his rep to boost or degrade another character's rep. Settlements of 1000s might transfer rep this way to their worst actors. Or transfer rep to those with coin. Crafters who never leave a settlement are going to have spare rep to burn.

2. PvP Flags that give rep gains over time. While the alignment based PvP flags have been removed, the functions of Champion and Enforcer are to be moved to factional PvP. Those flags gained rep over time; a character could flag while remaining safe behind town walls, for example.

3. SADing friends for Rep gains. The Outlaw flag has been removed, but Stand and Deliver will remain as a feat. Since successful SADs give rep gains, it might be easy to SAD friends to gain rep without risk.

4. Use Settlement size to ignore the few low rep members. Settlement improvements will be based in some degree on the settlement rep. If the rep is based on an average of all citizens and the great majority of citizens are high rep, the town can include a good number of low rep characters without affecting settlement advancements.

I'll encourage others to add to the list; if we keep them in a numerical sequence, it might be easier for GW to see the methods we can come up with. I think the 4 above are the most obvious. Only 46 more to go, but we aren't limited to 50.

But nobody actually likes those terms in that arrangement, and I mostly just insist on keeping them consistent so we understand what we're talking about. So... crowdforge us some new terms! :)

Qualifications:

• Must be immediately clear what's going on just based on the name (i.e., no really obscure words).
  
• Must make sense in the context of a(n) X Tool, X Kit, and X Node.

There's a challenge!

Looking for terms for
(a) resource collection from a node.
(b) resource collection from a node, after finding a special node that allows using the kit, etc.
(c) (optional) resource collection from an outpost structure.

The purpose of this thread is mostly to bounce around ideas - how could local chat channels work? Could players control local channels?

Many MMOs have both local and global chat channels; the size of local chat can vary according to the game. But local channel is often a good place to look for someone to game with, to locate a trading partner, or to just chat about stuff. They also have their share of abusers; foul language, abusive language, gold sellers, and trade spammers.

So in PFO, if we have local chat channels, what area will they cover and who controls them?

Here's a starting proposal:
- Local chat channels could cover 1 map hex. (This would mean that there's a large number of chat channels)
- Whoever owns the hex, controls the chat channel. So that means the owning company of a settlement controls the chat channel for that player settlement, the owning company of a watchtower POI controls that hex's channel, etc.
- The owning company has some (limited) moderation tools. So they might be able to mute someone for breaking the local rules, or for no reason at all. The players with these abilities wouldn't be able to block a player's personal chats, party chats or guild chats.
- Whatever moderation PFO provides would of course supercede any hex owner controls.

As an additional chat proposal - I think Taverns, Inns, and other meeting places should have their own chat channel. I don't know if these channels should be limited to current patrons. Perhaps visiting a tavern and buying a drink could unlock that channel for a week of real time. Just don't anger the barkeep or you're out!

So - not discussing GW moderations - could this work? What controls would you like over chat in your settlement? What protections do you want from overzealous chat police?