revcasy's page

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.

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.

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.

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.