revcasy's page

Got my alpha code late last night. Now I can't dl the installer. =(

Goblinworks site not really goblin-working. sorry.

I normally lean toward Wizard because I like having diverse capabilities. I'm a little worried though, especially in EE that there will be a limited number of spells (which kind of undermines the whole diversity thing)so that Wizard will be dissatisfying to play for a while.

In fact, I have no idea. Maybe just fighter or ranger, with a more spellcaster oriented destiny twin.

I want to know what else is going to give the heinous flag. I think I would like to be LE, and if you read carefully the only way to get evil without getting more chaotic is through the auspices of "heinous".

I can live with being a necromancer and a slave monger (the two actions specifically mentioned in last weeks blog that will make you "heinous"), but I would like to broaden my horizons, desecrate some temples, maybe torture some POW's etc. etc.

revcasy wrote:

Geez, some of you guys seem to be in denial. From painful personal experience I can say that it is better to acknowledge the truth, accept the way things are, then make a rational decision from there.

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You've got me all wrong, reverend. I have no problem with PvP. I very much dislike the bad rep PvP has gotten, but no problems with PvP.

I've even faced a Mech piloted by someone calling himself leperkhan over on MWO, which is exclusively PvP, albeit the closest you can get to griefing there is a cap rush.

I was in a PUG group. They won and deserved to win.

Recommend seeing what is being said before reacting to what you expect. I'll try and do the same.

Sorry, went back and read the entire thread again, not one of my better posts. Think I was defensive from reading something elsewhere on the forum.

Geez, some of you guys seem to be in denial. From painful personal experience I can say that it is better to acknowledge the truth, accept the way things are, then make a rational decision from there.

This is a sandbox game. The lead guy worked on Eve, he has specifically mentioned Ultima Online. The Devs have said that there will be open PvP. When you guys log in to the game you won't be able to claim ignorance. Downloading, installing, launching, logging in to a PvP game is consent to PvP. It would be impossible for anybody in the game to engage in non-consensual PvP. I could log in to BF3 and get upset when I get shot, but it would be pretty silly.

Sure, there will be circumstances when PvP will be penalized, there will be plenty of mechanical systems that make some areas safer than others (depending on the system they go with probably not perfectly safe ever, but safer), but have no doubt, you will get ganked. It isn't that freakin' bad, it's annoying maybe, but you are playing a game, stuff happens.

Griefing is a separate thing, and I can't help thinking while reading this thread, "You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means."

Is avoiding PvP by sticking to safer areas and fleeing from fights a valid playstyle? Sure. Have at it. You might even enjoy it. Personally, as a person with some experience with sandbox MMOs, I find that style of play gets really boring after a while. I love theme parks. I love the pure PvE parts of theme parks. This isn't a theme park.

Look, we are going to get a lot of this over the months until release. I think the best policy is, rather than writing apologetics lauding the virtues of PvP and trying to convince a non-PvPer that they will have fun if they just give it a shot, instead just respond with something like, "Yes, this is a PvP based game. If you do not enjoy PvP, this may not be the game for you."

I know our heart is in the right place, but I, at least, would prefer not to convince people to buy the game who have a good chance of not enjoying it, and a perfectly valid reason for potentially feeling that way.

No I think chaotic evil killing chaotic evil has or should have no significance in any alignment tracking system. It only matters to those of non-evil and/or non-chaotic alignments who you kill.

Griefing is something completely different from PvP in an open PvP game. If you are in the game, then on some level PvP is always consensual. There are times when it is inconvenient, there are times when it is not exactly fun... in the same way that getting gibbed in Quake isn't fun, but it's a PvP game, so the act of PvP can never in itself be griefing.

Griefing is intentionally abusing game mechanics to systematically harass or ruin the play experience of another player. Spawn camping, corpse camping, stalking, etc. You guys know what constitutes systematic harassment. These are things that only need one game mechanic to handle--a "report" button.

Sure. Have to have evil for the whole thing to work right.

But at the same time we don't want griefing, period.

Leaving aside the issue of griefing, I was responding to your assertion that if good wanted an evil force to fight against that we had to offer some sort of advantage or at least equal footing to those playing evil characters.

I don't think we do, per my previous post. I think evil will thrive no matter what we throw at it.

BTW, how do you define griefing in an open PvP game?

People will play evil if it affords them the opportunity to be a jerk. (Chaotic) Evil characters can kill anyone they want, any time they want if they are strong enough and take what they want. That alone is more than enough incentive to create a group of players who do just that.

Look at early Ultima Online. There were plenty of PKs with red names running around, even though having that flag seriously limited where you could go and what NPC's you could deal with. Even though having that flag made you a free kill for anybody who PvPed but didn't want to be red. It was like a target on your back.

Evil is fun. Think of Grand Theft Auto. How fun was it to steal a hot car and plow through a crowd of pedestrians? Pretty fun. Evil does not need any mechanical advantages or bonuses, and can even stand up under a fair number of disadvantages because some people (many people) will simply enjoy it.

I generaly think that the Alignment system is pretty pointless as people will simply GAME the system to get the alignment that they want to have anyway. There is really no way that you can make an automated system that can't be gamed. So how have you actualy gained anything more then just letting people choose want alignment they want to have.

Example: You have a character who wants to be Good. But they gank someone...clearly an Evil Act. Since they don't want to be "Evil", they go ahead and perform whatever act they know will shift them to "Good", the Alignment they want to be...whether that's killing 50 orcs...or making 50 offerings to Imodae or whatever. Then they can go out and "gank" someone again.

The only thing you've added to the game is a time-sink....or simply the people who can afford to time-sink/grind get to be whatever alignment they want....and everyone else is stuck with whatever logic (probably flawed) the automated system uses to adjudicate shifts. At it's worst case you have players that manipulate/game other players into unintentional alignment shifts that they have to grind/time-sink to get rid of....congrats, a new form of griefing is introduced.

The crucial difference in your example is that the character you mention can't go and repeatedly gank people without consequence. The grind or time sink to continually adjust their alignment to where they want it is a deterrent to ganking. The time investment necessary in this scenario encourages the person to play an alignment that matches their play style. It does not make it impossible to have a character who is good who occasionally murders innocent people, but nobody ever said the alignment system would do that.

I think there are a lot of possibilities that exist in the space between "perfect" and "pretty pointless" (to use your words), and I am fine with a system that fits in there somewhere reasonable.

This proposed spell component system sounds very similar to the system they ended up switching to in Asheron's Call (the only MMO I know of where there are spell components). You carry around a focus for each school of magic that you want to cast. This focus is bulky and limits your inventory. They never degrade, but I suppose making a component bag less bulky but degradable is a good trade off.

Adding in levels of component bags for casting higher tiers of spells, make them craftable, so that the low level ones can be bought from an NPC or a player, but the high level ones are from crafting only.

I like it! This seems perfect to me.

Game time/character speed are sped up by a factor of four, right? I was thinking that I heard that.

In that case it would take 15-20 minutes to cross a hex. I can't do the exact math on crossing the map right now because of the way hexagons tile a plane (not the same as squares), but probably in the neighborhood of 4 hours.

If I have done the math correctly a regular hexagon with an area of 16 square miles would have sides roughly 2.5 miles (~4 km) long and an r (distance from center to one of the vertices)also equal to 2.5 miles.

If you walked from the center of one side to the center of the opposite side (height) you would go ~4.3 miles. If you walked from one vertex to the opposite vertex (width) you would go 5 miles.

So, any straight line you draw which passes through the center of the hexagon will be between 4.3 and 5 miles long measured from entry point to exit point.

Well, this doesn't really help to settle anything, but having a bunch of small villages relatively close together is exactly what the more populated parts of Western Europe would have looked like in the Middle Ages. There are also parts of rural China that still look this way. Though, what drove/drives that pattern of settlement in both those cases is a particular pattern of land use for agriculture.

Setting that aside as irrelevant (which it is), this is not an optimal set up for an MMO. Simple solution, double the size of each hex, keeping everything else the same. Like I said, simple. =P

More complex solutions include: 1. Make it reaaaaaaaally hard to start a settlement or, 2. Make many hexes arbitrarily ineligible for player settlement and scatter these ineligible hexes around so that the settlement density remains low.

From everything I have read so far they have not described a way to actually become more good, or to put it more precisely "less evil".

There have been plenty of examples of things a character can do to drift toward chaotic and/or evil, but not so much the other way around. I'll be interested to hear more about this. I agree that it is going to be difficult to design a good, functioning system for alignment.

On another note, I am pretty sure one of mains will be an Asmodeus worshiping mage with a thirst for power. Should be fun. =)

To me it sounds plenty big geographically. However, there are some major things that have nothing to do with geographical area that can make a big difference in how large a world feels.

How easy will it be to take a straight line to wherever you want to go? Can I set out from my spawn point and always walk to a point of interest as the crow flies, without worrying too much about terrain obstacles? The terrain from the little map that I saw somewhere (link anybody?) seems pretty open... scratch that, it seems extremely open by MMO standards.

Will there be zone lines and loading screens? These make a world feel much more closed-in and confined, but from a technical standpoint they are an important trade-off that designers often make to achieve other things.

How much "stuff" will there be to see as I wander around? If there are usually a few ways to cross a hex from facet to facet without really encountering anything other than trees or grass, the world will seem bigger, and the 4 minutes spent engaged in such a walk will pass slowly. In this case though, this is not necessarily a good thing in abundance. You want a good blend of emptiness and fullness. It might be good to occasionally have barren areas, because that builds a sense of space and wilderness, but if you have too much then the world feels boring and empty. It's a tricky balance.

Yeah, already running the risk of drawing wife aggro at this point. Wish I could pledge more. I would love to have the print versions of the books, but that extra $100... ah well.

That said, the KS seems to be doing impressively well this morning, so here's hoping.

Mounted combat would be fantastic in an MMO with formations, though I understand that it is difficult to implement. The only game I have played with mounted combat is Mount and Blade, and I guess that it took so much of the developer's resources that the game was basically just about that one thing.

At the height of mounted combat in Europe in the high medieval period, the heavy cavalry charge dominated the battlefield and was the determining factor in almost every other tactic used. In the Crusades, particularly the first crusade, units of heavy cavalry regularly routed enemy forces 10 times their size.

In the march to battle knights did not ride their warhorses, but rather horses called palfreys, and each knight might have two or three palfreys, a few mounted squires and men-at-arms. In a sense a knight wasn't just a knight, he was a whole fighting squad. His weapons and armor were items that only the wealthy could afford, and his warhorse... warhorses were the Lamborghini or Leer Jet of the Middle Ages: fantastically, epic-ly expensive, not just to buy, but also to train and maintain.

"My kingdom for a horse!" has a slightly different ring to it with those facts in mind.

I was just thinking that if they want to take a more free-form direction, they could instead of/in addition to pre-set formations, have the ability for players to form up in whatever way they want, then the commander or squad leader "locks" them in, and the game automatically maintains them in that formation as they move, etc.

So, in a game with area of effect magic, it becomes a delicate balance between concentrating as many swords as possible on individual targets, versus spreading out so that your whole squad isn't inside the radius of a fireball for example.

A concentrated cube of tanky swordsmen would be great at defining the battlefield and protecting flanks or holding a center, but if the other side has lots of offensive spell casters your swordsmen may be in trouble.

Use wizards to bust open the flank of a large army, then charge in with your own warriors or raging barbarians (highly mobile strike infantry) and hit their rear.

You know what, if GW doesn't make this game, I may have to. =)

Your internet wizardry astounds me. Thanks =)

I understand where you are coming from. I have been playing pen and paper games for over 25 years. I like the Pathfinder system, obviously, and I hope that they stick as closely as they can to it wherever it is feasible.

However, Pathfinder, and the AD&D system before it going all the way back to First Edition, and even Chainmail (the proto-D&D) was intended from its conception to handle small scale combat, no more than 6 or 8 players (and all on the same side)--not squad and certainly not platoon scale. It did and does this in a way that is fun, but not particularly realistic. And many of it's basic premises, if not it's mechanics, influenced most of the alternate game systems that came after it. So, when MUDs and later MMOs came along they were also unavoidably influenced by the premises of the pen and paper rpgs around, not to mention being technically restricted by the systems and networks that they operated on.

All of this explains the kind of sad state of large scale PvP combat in modern MMO's. Those MMO's are iterations of the same basic ideas and systems, which at their core were never intended to deal with any such thing as players fighting players, much less at a massive scale. Sure developers tack on refinements and improvements, but they never really address the underlying assumptions that they didn't even make themselves, that they instead inherited from the rpg tradition.

My argument is that their needs to me a more robust, fundamental solution to these problems, and that the Pathfinder system, for all of it's many strengths, is not going to get us where we need to be in the specific area of large scale PvP.

My guess is that they will lock you into formation, in other words you will not have to move your character, it will simply move automatically to stay in formation.

One good reason for thinking this is that the devs said in an interview somewhere (sorry, no source) that formations help with network bandwidth by reducing the amount of information that needs to be sent back and forth. The only way that could be true is if you are not sending movement control signals for your character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfilade_and_defilade

The whole reason formations were important in ancient and medieval warfare has to do with flanking. If you have two big disorganized mobs of people fighting one another, things are going to get pretty chaotic, the mobs are going to blend together,individuals will get flanked on multiple sides, surrounded, cut-off, and there will be a lot of casualties, or else a lot of running away, or both (which pretty accurately describes most large-scale PvP in MMO's). If you are an ancient soldier would you rather be running helter-skelter into a big glob of the enemy, or standing, practically arm-in-arm with guys on either side, and probably a guy behind, all of them carrying pointy metal things and ready to cover your flanks? All of this made possible by the real world property of matter that two things can't occupy the same space at the same time, aka "collision detection".

Enfilade has to do with the various properties of a formation depending on the way it is facing. If you are in a line, and you are perpendicular to your foe, you are going to have a bad time, but if you are parallel to the enemy, they will struggle to hit you all at the same time with a grenade or a fireball spell, etc. If you are locked in a formation and someone flanks you in hand-to-hand combat... well first of all you are facing the wrong way, they can hit you but you can't hit them, and your friends with pointy things might not be in a position to cover your back. If archers are firing at you from the side, your shield is in the wrong place, and even if they miss you maybe they hit the guy next to you, how can they miss? If you are in a tight formation because of limited space, or to bring your force to bear on a concentrated area (see von Clausewitz) and a wizard drops an AoE, it's going to hurt your whole unit more than if you were spread out.

So, my point is, these formations that the devs want to implement don't need to have special in-game properties or rules for them to be important, complicated, and well... tactical, they just have to mirror the real world in certain crucial ways, and then the game play will follow in a very sandbox-y way.

You guys are probably going to see me harp on this quite a bit over the next couple of years, so I might as well get started now. =)

The devs have said that they intend to try and include real formations that players can enter. This is an cool idea that can lead to a much more tactical feeling in combat, particularly PvP combat, and can even improve network performance and enable larger scale battles.

Now, I know that you guys are not stupid, but let me point out some things that are probably already obvious to all of you.

Collision detection is when two models interact in a realistic way so that one cannot pass through the other one, for instance a player walking through a wall, or a monster, or another player. MMO's typically use collision detection in a pretty selective way. A player or monster may not be able to walk through a wall, but they might be able to walk through each other and players are usually able to pass through the same space at the same time, though sometimes not while they are in combat with one another.

The rationale for turning off collision detection usually has to do with preventing NPCs from blocking vital areas or crowded areas from becoming annoying, and also to prevent players from griefing one another by blocking or trapping another character in a small space that they cannot leave.

I am not sure I have a strong opinion about out-of-combat collision detection, but I feel that it should always be turned on while in combat, and--more to the point--formations as a whole should have collision detection (i.e. one formation, friendly or not, should not be able to pass through another, and even individual players, friendly or not, should not be able to pass through a formation), there may be exceptions to this--maybe very open formations should not prevent passage as a total unit (though the individual soldiers in it might depending on the circumstances). So, two open formations might pass through each other with some difficulty, but a closed one probably could not pass through an open one.

Note that we could go into a great deal more detail having to do with opposing forces breaking up one another's formations, etc. but this isn't a hardcore wargame, and maybe that's a conversation for another day.

Next post: enfilade, flanking, and what it means for you.

Mac's do not use DirectX. They use OpenGL.

I am not a programmer, and I get the impression that it is rather complicated, but I believe that converting from DirectX to OpenGL is one of the biggest hurdles that a developer has to cross when porting something from Windows to Mac.

Windows actually supports OpenGL as well as DirectX, but I believe that there are many considerations besides cross-platform compatibility that motivate companies to use DirectX when making their games.

The PFO curve does seem similar to some of those.

One thing to note is that generally projects that have already met their funding goal tend to get less of a last minute bump than those that are in danger of not making it.

The examples given so far in the thread that seem to most closely match PFO's Kickstarter are Z. and Shadowrun Online. Neither would have been funded if not for the last few days of their run.

Z. was asking for $100k. They made ~$50k or roughly 40% of their total funding the last 3 days of their kickstarter.

Shadowrun Online was asking for $500k. They made ~$209k or about 37% of their total funding in the last 2 days of their kickstarter.

If PFO's kickstarter has similar performance the last 2 or 3 days, they will have more than adequate funding to meet their goal.

My two worries are 1.that $1 million is a lot of money, and there may be an upper bound on how much you can expect to take in within a limited time frame, and 2. as they are so fond of saying in the world of financial markets, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results".

It went up $10k in half an hour a few hours ago. We need 30 more of those. =)

I don't think I ever realized how much a million dollars is.