Valin Alistar's page

@Kakafika: Yeah, it should also be hard for players to calculate just how much things are affecting their alignment. I don't want people going, "Okay, so at the currently recovery rate, if I do these three actions, I can murder someone every 38 minutes without loosing my alignment."

I do agree that having it always be the same flat value for an act would make the system much easier to game.

Overall a very encouraging blog. Core alignment is a much better way to handle the issue of alignment drift and training restrictions and ability use being restricted by your actual alignment makes a lot of sense.

I would not play PFO if it is in forced first person. I understand it is more immerse for some people but not for me. I feel absolutely no attachment to any character I have ever played in first person.

When I play games like this I'm not trying to project myself into another world I am trying to imagine someone else living in that world. I like seeing the character I play and hate feeling like they are a floating pair of hands holding a weapon of some sort.

I just want to say I think the ideas presented in this blog are excellent.

I love that spells will be something fundamentally different from "normal" attacks. One of my biggest complaints with almost all (fantasy) MMOs is that magic is just another type of ranged attack, usually with slightly fancier graphics.

Having them be something powerful but limited and costly should go a long way toward making magic magical again.

Also I really like that a spell book is a unique strength and weakness and the drive to acquire new spells should lead to all sorts of appropriately wizardly behavior.

Finally I'd enjoy seeing ritual siege magic and magic wards against it in addition to more mundane siege engines and walls.

OK... Let me plot this scenario out.. bear with me, I will be walking down the "Path of Ridiculousness" heading to the "Land of Not Likely Going to Happen."

Bluddwolf wrote:

I am the stealthy guy.

I stealth my way into a horde of 20 Goblins, and hope that I pass 20 x perception rolls to do it.

....

Waiting... Hoping... Dead!

That would be the absolute worst way to attempt this "exploit", here is a far more likely scenario.

Stealth guy sees a wizard clearing NPC groups using AoE attacks and decides he wants kill him while avoiding the mechanics that are meant to discourage random unprovoked player-killing (flagging, alignment hit, etc).

Stealth guy sneaks around to the periphery of the next group the wizard is going to nuke and places himself just inside the likely blast area.

Wizard is unaware stealth guy is there and throws a fireball. Stealth guy gets hit and Wizard is flagged as the aggressor. (If PFO follows the source stealth guy may very well have Evasion and take little to no damage.)

The NPCs immediately attack the wizard because stealth guy has not generated any threat against them and the wizard just did a bunch of damage to all of them. Stealth guy also attacks the wizard as he's already fighting the NPC. Worse the system will treat the wizard as a ganker/random player killer if he fights back and wins.

Now you can certainly argue that this is acceptable, but I think it will lead to the unintended consequence of AoE attacks never being used outside of instanced dungions where you can guaranty you're only going to hit who you expect to be there.

Personally I would keep friendly fire but not have the wizard flag/penalized for hitting a hidden target. I think the odds of someone accidentally being in a group your are about to nuke is very low. I think the odds of "rogues" deliberately using it to avoid the penalties for ganking are very high assuming those penalties are effective enough to act as a real deterrent to that sort of behavior.

I like the idea of diminishing returns on AoE damage. I'm worried about friendly fire, stealth, and flags/alignment.

It seems like it would be very easy to create situations where you force flags and alignment hits on other players. For example a character with high stealth hiding near a pack of NPC monsters. This in turn could make AoE attacks highly impractical/undesirable outside of instances.

@ Being
Thanks,

To further iterate on the idea using a cult as an example:

When the event starts each day one of the following spawns somewhere in the settlement zone, with A and B being most likely and C fairly rare.
A) An abandoned alter to the chaotic evil god.
B) A group of NPC who are heretic cultists.
C) An active alter surrounded by cultists.

Each can be interacted with in different ways.
A) An abandoned alter can be investigated using a reliant skill (Perception, Knowledge: Religion, etc) with a fairly high target number (because there is no risk). Each character would only have a single chance to investigate it. When someone succeeds it despawns and they receive a "clue" in their inventory. Their might also be a chance to receive another item, for example a scrap of heretical text, that could be used to gain some benefit at the cost of an alignment hit (... lest monsters we become).

B) NPC heretics are not inherently aggressive, a character may use a social skill (Bluff, Intimidation, etc) to try and gain a "clue". If the character fails the roll badly enough the NPCs become hostile and attack that character, at which point city guards might intervene etc. The NPCs remain until defeated or someone succeeds at the social check.

C) Is a combination of A and B. The NPCs would defend the alter so it could not be investigated until they are dealt with, although Stealth could be used to avoid them and investigate it without combat. Because of the added risk/complication of the cultists the difficulty of the investigation roll would be less. Once the NPCs are defeated/removed the alter would stay but would change to an abandoned alter after a few minutes. This spawn would have the possibility of providing two clues, one form the cultists through social skills and one from the alter.

Somewhere in the settlement hex the cultists would have a hideout/instance that requires X numbers of clues to gain access to. It's possible X could be modified by a character's Knowledge skills, so a character with a high Knowledge:Religion would need fewer clues to "find" the base. Once someone has gained enough clues (which may or may not be traded?) they and anyone grouped with them can enter and face the cult in a "dungeon". If they party succeeds the event ends and they are rewarded.

The event would escalate; more random spawns per day possibly with added tougher NPCs. The enemies in the final dungeon would also grow harder/more numerous and eventually they would summon a demon. If the event escalates to many times it would start to reduce the Development Indexes of the hex.

As I said earlier the owners of the settlement could post a reward for whoever successfully stops the event. A further idea is that players who's alignment/politics align with the cult could take actions which escalates it faster. For example a chaotic/evil character with Knowledge:Religion might be able to inspire the cultists instead of getting a clue from them. Then they do so the event would be pushed forward a day and that character would gain positive standing/reputation with the cult.

It seems like having monsters spawn within the settlement to run around it seems dubious, at least if settlements can get NPC guards which would thus be spending server cycles for NPCs to fights NPCs, although if small poor settlements CAN'T afford their own NPC guards, that could happen also.

Only if having NPCs fighting NPCs has no effect on the settlement. If, for example, guards lost to other NPCs are not available for other uses for a time then it would give the leaders of the settlement incentive to get the event resolved.

If monsters can turn any hex back into a 'monster hex' or a monster controlled hex, then that isn't a danger.

GW controls where and how much monsters spawn ANYWHERE in the world, so if there is no more monster controlled hexes,
they will spawn in other hexes, and do there thing from there...
GW already described how the minimal level of 'infestation' progresses to stronger points,
but if 'monster hexes' are fixed, then once they are defeated, they will just return at the lowest level,
which any strong and developed settlement/nation should easily be able to keep 'pruned'.
...Which sounds just as much a boring, civilized world to me.

I would hope that occasionally very powerful monsters/challenges would spawn in monster zones to prevent them from being easily and permanently 'pruned'.

I'm not saying that hexes changing type is a bad thing but I don't think its a feature needed for launch.

Another idea to explore but certainly not needed at launch. A chance of PvE content in settlement hexes based off of the attribute of the hex, kind of like monster zones.

For example in a lawful settlement with a temple there would be a chance of an NPC cult springing up dedicated to a chaotic evil god. The event could start with heretic NPCs and alters to the cult spawning around hex that could be interacted with or fought, a few at first but more and more over time if the event is not dealt with.

Eventually clues would be gathered from these that would lead to a location or instance inside the settlement zone that is the cults base, which when destroyed ends the event and rewards the brave adventures involved.

If the even goes on to long it would start to negatively impact the settlement, reducing Development Indexes, and the owners of the hex could post rewards for whoever ends the event, like posting a bounty.

I think breaking each super-hex into smaller ones that can be fought over individually is a very good change.

I'm also ok with the monster hexes being permanent, I immediately thought of Mirkwood or a haunted swamp that can never truly be tamed. Eventually having some system to convert wilderness hexes to settlement hexes or monster hexes to wilderness might make sense but I don't think its needed for a minimally viable game and would have a lot of implications that would need to be worked through. Having the world become to civilized would be boring after all.

Trying to include a MOBA in PFO would be a lose-lose proposition.

If the MOBA flops (which seems likely) it would waste significant development resources. As other have pointed out a MOBA has very different mechanics from an MMO and would require several new sub-systems that would need to be designed, tested, and balanced (an ongoing process).

But the second problem is that in the unlikely event that the MOBA is a success it would utterly overwhelm the rest of PFO. Successful MOBA have hundreds of thousands or millions of players, they foster a professional league with large cash prizes and all the problems and commitments that entails. They demand a constant re-balancing and a steady stream of new purchasable characters to pay for it all.

If PFO had a successful MOBA embedded within it then that would quickly become the game with the "core world" relegated to a distant after thought as the developers struggle to deal with the sudden influx and demands of many thousands of players who only care about this "mini-game".

That may be true among equally skilled/experienced characters but again one of the potential avenues of abuse is highly skilled characters vs much newer ones. Also if there is any sort of chat then you may not even get the opportunity to challenge their false identity.

Also this opens up the very thorny question of what is the line between legitimate use of a false identity and unacceptable behavior? After all the skill would exist to deceive other players and gain some advantage over them.

@ Nihimon,

1) The more things devs/mods have to get involved in the more expensive the game is to run. Also without a single identity to tie to all the events the victims may not even realize there is anything to report, instead leaving in frustration and spreading the word pf PFO's terrible community.

2&3) Again this takes a lot of time and effort. Also how will new players be able to sort out who is being genuinely helpful and who is another of Bob's disguises.

Lets say word gets out and "Mr. Nice" comes to help with the Bob situation. Bob takes a new identity starts telling everyone "Mr. Nice" is really Alice, Steve, Keven and Jane.

@ Dario

There is a big difference between not being able to verify the identity new characters and not being able to verify the identity of anyone. In Eve a lot of corporations will not recruit new characters for fear of spies. Whole corporations have been undone by long cons where someone joined, worked their way up to a trusted position and destroyed them from the inside.

But that is relatively rare due to the time and dedication it takes to create a new character, advance them, get into the guild, etc, and it can only be done once per alt because when word that Killer667 took down his last guild, or ran a massive pyramid scam, no in their right mind would trust that character again.

And again my example is only one very small, very simple way this could be abused. Allowing character anonymity exponentially increases the time and effort it takes to deal with "bad actors" for everyone involved.

The "system" will always know who those people are and they can be tracked by the system if their offenses are grevious enough. But it just makes sense for Disguise to be a trainable skill just like any other skill. Maybe if they are supremely skilled they could even make their current flag not show (unless "Assassin", "Heinous", or "Attacker" actually have the stink of evil on them).

Hey, a good disguise also means Dudley DoRight could disguise himself as a Necromancer and sneak into Zombietown to kill the Heinous Zombie-Summoning SuperNecroZombieGuy.

While this is true the "system" has no way of knowing when a player is going out of their way to make new players experiences miserable or destroy a guild's reputation. While I understand the appeal of systems like this it has tremendous potential for abuse.

Here is a very simple example. "Bob" decides to have some fun at the expense of new players and starts giving out really bad advice/wrong information about how the game works and offering to help only to lead them to dangerous situations and leave the new players to die.

In a normal MMO the new players would quickly learn that Bob is unreliable and ignore him. If this player continues to do so they would warn other new players not to trust Bob. If Bob is obnoxious enough it might even have other consequences, getting back to Bob's guild or other high level players who can do something about Bob (tell him to lay off, guild kick him, PK him, whatever).

But if Bob is allowed to change his identity then there is no chance of his griefing every having negative consequences for him or for new players to adapt/defend themselves. Bob pretends to be Alice when he starts and when they learn not to trust Alice he becomes Steve, then Keven, then Jane, etc...

While these are very interesting ideas allow me to play devil's advocate.

Character's having a single, obvious, unalterable identity is absolutely critical to holding them accountable for their actions. It is already very hard to foster a good community in an online game and giving characters a high degree of anonymity removes the communities best, possibly only, tool for doing so.

In a "world" where death is at most a temporary setback the only lasting consequences are social ones. If you cannot tell who the griefers, liars, and cheats are it becomes impossible to do anything about them.