Goblin Squad Member
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I am leery of how things will play out for PFO but did supportted the kickstarter nonetheless, and as things are taking shape I am looking forward to some of the designs of the game.
That being said I have a few questions and perhaps you guys can help me out or point me in the right direction where to find some of the answers.
First I am wondering about character slots? Has there been an official word on how many slots per account? I can think of a couple classes I w really want to play, and few more I would really want to try.. (especially if prestige classes find their way into the game eventually)
Since most my table top time is spent as a cleric, I had a few questions about them, from reading the blogs I read the portion about AoE effects, but no mention was made of channel healing or negative energy channeling , only damage based spells. If I were playing a good cleric will selective channel still be an option? likewise if I play an evil one and want to channel to harm will selective channeling still be an option? ( for pure MMO folks selective channel basically lets you remove a certain # of targets from the effect)
I also was channeling my evil thought process this evening and had a diet coke of evil moment while thinking about crafting... Will I be able to purposely create cursed items and pass them off as something else?... If cursed items exist in the game (can only assume they will since the goal is to include all options in the core rulebook).. Will there be labels on items to let you know who made it? Could open me up to some assassination attempts, but could also be amusing to some degree!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Areks beat me to it but yeah, as far as I am aware, there has been no official word on character slots, though destiny's twin from the kickstarter would assume atleast 2. Also keep in mind, there are no classes in game and anyone can play any class and do anything. If you ever played Eve online, it is a similar leveling system and classless system that they use. If you start as a cleric type, then decide to train rogue skills, then your a stealthy cleric or a healing rogue.
No info on clerics yet, only spellcasting "class" blogged thus far is the wizard, even sorcerer will run a bit different. I am sure they will have a modified version of select channel (maybe something like everyone in area, only party, only non-party. and you select between those options, or atleast something like that.)
The cursed item would be a really cool idea, and the idea of "marking" an item crafted has been discussed and seams to be desired as a whole. Maybe a tie into a forging skill to put someone else's name on a item you made...that just started a whole nother evil thought process. LOL GG
Hope that helps.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hi Tuffon
#1 The most official info that I have seen indicates that there will be only 1 character able, per account, to gain exp pts. There may or may not be more than 1 slot per account. The Kickstart reward "Destiny's Twin" is the exception to that. There will be a cash shop where you can purchase exp time to add to alternate characters and for the FTP market. Exp time will be available in game via players selling it for game gold.
#2 No real blog info about clerics yet or their various powers.
#3 No mention of cursed items that I have yet seen or whether cursed items would be by design or accident. No hard mention of craftables being "stamped" or named by the maker.
Hope that answers your questions. :)
Edit: Tricksy Areks and Milo are too quick for the Precious...
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Goblin Squad Member
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1) There is so far no good reason given why GW would restrict the numbers of characters per account. But remember that the subscription only pays for training one of them (2 with destiny twin) and it is a classless system, so trying out different playstyles/roles is likely better done with your main instead of using alts.
The main reason for using multiple alts would be RP (new name, look, background) or various types of information gathering (keeping an eye on markets, other settlements etc)
2) Selective channeling is a 'friendly fire' topic more than a 'cleric' topic, really. Channeling will work as a mass buff or as damage. In practical terms, selecting/unselecting multiple targets in real-time combat is clunky, though selective channeling might give you extra options (only party, friendly combatants, all allied, all allied+neutrals, etc).
What we seem to know about clerics is that they will equip different holy symbols for different domain abilities/spells. We expect that most divine abilities will be alignment-dependent, but we do not know if you could train as priest of multiple deities. Possibly all churches are implemented as mutually exclusive npc organizations. A cleric blog might shed much-wanted light on many tangled topics.
3) This is not so much about crafting as about frauding/tricking other players, similar to selling illusory object and summoned mounts. I suspect it will not be allowed only if implemented in a fashion where it is very clear what is happening. As part of RP, I (the character) may well choose to buy your (clearly to me, the player) cursed/illusory/summoned item and come back to confront you later. But a mechanism to help actually fraud other players - not going to happen.
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Goblin Squad Member
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First I am wondering about character slots? Has there been an official word on how many slots per account?
There has not been an officially announced limit, but I expect it to be generally unlimited.
You will be able to have more than one character training on an account. You will pay for all the training you get. So you will be able to pay 2x the monthly subscription cost and have 2 characters training in parallel. Or you can get parallel training using training time purchased direct from the cash store, or acquired on the in-game market for Coin. There is no practical limit to how many characters you'll be able to train in parallel.
There really aren't any developer posts relevant to the rest of your questions, although I do recall a thread on cursed items.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think that PFO will handle Characters in a significantly different way than other MMOs - witness their decision (thank you,again!) to allow players to log in multiple characters from the same account at the same time.
I expect that, in essence, each Character will be analgous to a single-character Account from another game, but they'll all be easily available under a single login. I don't expect PFO to limit the number of Characters you can have on a single PFO Account any more than EVE limits the number of Accounts you can have on a single Credit Card.
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Goblin Squad Member
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3) This is not so much about crafting as about frauding/tricking other players, similar to selling illusory object and summoned mounts. I suspect it will not be allowed only if implemented in a fashion where it is very clear what is happening. As part of RP, I (the character) may well choose to buy your (clearly to me, the player) cursed/illusory/summoned item and come back to confront you later. But a mechanism to help actually fraud other players - not going to happen.
I don't know about this one. EVE Online falls firmly on the side of "buyer beware" when it comes to mislabeled/misleading/extremely-overpriced transactions. GW seems to want to police griefing more than CCP does, but I don't know whether that will extend to transactions. Hopefully, it would be impossible to list a temporary summoned or illusory item for sale. Cursed items might or might not be labeled as such without a skill check or magical detection. Selling cursed items could result in claims and counter-claims over whether the seller knew the item was cursed before putting it up for sale.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks for the replies folks!
Actually I hadn’t thought of selling the cursed things at market,
My first thought for cursed items was to carry a few around with me, perhaps even wear one and not thread it... So you killed me and took my stuff.. ooo how sad you now need a removed curse...
As for the Market and selling the item, I agree it could fall under fraud and probably should not be allowed, that being said a system can be created for most anything. Holding a portion of the gold in escrow to be returned once the item is equipped could be fun to some degree ( like a shield is normally 1000 + 150+price of the shield, so the crafter keeps the 150 masterwork and price of the shield but the magic portion is returned, not something a sane person would do unless they liked losing 1k gold every item). Yet I could still use my original plan to leave a few things for the folks that kill me and take my stuff.
As for the Classes I have something that I cant get straight in my head, I understand the xp is not like grinding out kills. I have read it will take 2.5 years to max a character. What I don’t get is some post make it feel like the maxed out version of the character will feel like a lvl 20 in a core class. Yet i also read in the blogs that the general power curve is going to aim for level 7-9, as far as the power level of a character. So which is actually correct are we striving to be a lvl 9 character after 2.5 years or closer to the lvl 20 version of the character?
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Goblin Squad Member
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ON a side note I read in one of the threads about gold farmers (perhaps someone can paste this to the right one if they remember which one, or direct me to where i saw it.)
People seem to be worried about gold farmers and spammers , I 100% agree that this needs to be addressed in design but no game has been able to implement a system. Ill try to explain how to implement a safe system ( all though storing the data and enforcement is a decision for others)
First Design a system to flag all transactions of ____ gold or higher( id suggest 10k and grow it as the game grows). Logging of transactions between players should already be handled, so its just a matter of storing the transactions in a table for a few weeks till you can run analysis on them.
Second. Since this will be obvious after the first few farmers that get banned, reduced the amount that creates the flag by a fifth ( so 2000 for my example)
Third a trade between 2 players should be a trade, all though players can make their own prices to buy and sell, when you are creating the logs of the transactions instead of just logging the items that change hands have each item have a shadow price( a minimum price the designers feel the item should sell for). If the transaction between the 2 players doesn’t meet this shadow price threshhold you flag both accounts. Logging purposes and data storage would have to be increased but really at this point what is a another column on the data table.
Finally since farmers are smart beyond their years eventually they will discover your shadow prices and min gold flags, So you also keep one more field dedicated on the log to count transactions between the same accounts over a certain amount of time( say 3 hours). So > 4 transactions between the same 2 accounts creates a flag.
Once you run the query to get the flags then just have a human review them and see if they can make sense of it. Same name for billing on both accounts can be thrown out by logic or by a human. Anyway if there is at least one person looking at these flags each day Farmers may have a hard time in the Riverlands.
Anyway somewhere on these boards someone asked was there a way to discourage or prevent gold farmers, I still feel the answer is yes, it is just a matter of how much the designers wish to spend on the data storage and logic to create the system and then how much they let the GM’s and CSR enforce it.
@Tuffon
There are many legitimate reasons to do most of the transactions you list above. Indeed on my eve accounts I have frequently done all of them but I have never been a gold spammer, gold seller or gold buyer.
I think before you can decide the system will work you need background information on how common such transactions are while being legitimate. If 90% of the time these are evidence of something dodgy then it may be worthwhile using this system.
I am not saying here the system isn't worth it I am just questioning how many false positives you would get and whether the cost of human examination would be cost effective. I don't even have an idea to be honest about what percentage of false positives cause the system to stop being cost effective.
examples of legit transactions that may get flagged
1) juggling of loot after a mission/harvesting expedition when dividing spoils
2) Someone gifting a newer player money/equipment
3) Someone making a non contracted payment for some service
4) Someone laundering a transaction through a third party to disguise the source of the transaction for espionage/sabotage style activities
5) Payments for non items such as information/rumours/bribes to leave the area
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Goblin Squad Member
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With regard to character slots ... it may make sense to have two separate accounts. This would allow you to run one of your characters from each account in separate windows or even on two separate laptops.
With two accounts one can mine while the other hauls or you can even send both adventuring together providing you think you can drive two characters in combat at once.
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Goblin Squad Member
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With regard to character slots ... it may make sense to have two separate accounts. This would allow you to run one of your characters from each account in separate windows or even on two separate laptops.
With two accounts one can mine while the other hauls or you can even send both adventuring together providing you think you can drive two characters in combat at once.
This won't be necessary in PFO. You'll be able to log in more than one character from the same account at the same time. I am extremely grateful for this, since I'd been lobbying for it for a very long time. My position was that any advantage you can get by having multiple accounts should be given to players who use a single account.
You will be able to log in more than one character on the same account. So you can run the client twice, or run the client on two computers logged into the same account. (This is commonly called "multiboxing").
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea of carrying a few cursed items as a "poison pill" for anyone who lots your corpse. We still don't know whether looters will receive a random assortment of your un-threaded gear, or will be allowed to pick and choose. Either way, that could be a nasty surprise, if they equip looted gear before casting (or having someone else cast) detect magic on it.
Power levels are still kind of up in the air. When people talk about maxing out a class, I think they're referring to taking that class as far as it can go, whether that means 9th level equivalent, 12th level equivalent, or 20th level equivalent.
I'm pretty certain that 20th level equivalent is farther than GW wants us to go in any class. A 20th level character can pretty easily squash a 10th level character (or 5th, or 1st) in tabletop Pathfinder, and that's something the GW folks have said they want to avoid in PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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We still don't know whether looters will receive a random assortment of your un-threaded gear, or will be allowed to pick and choose.
Originally, the idea was that it would be a random selection:
However, if another player finds your husk before you do, they'll be able to loot it. They won't recover everything that you had in your inventory—just a random selection—but the rest of your inventory will be destroyed and removed from the game.
But it sounds like the current thinking is that the looter should get to choose:
When looting a husk, it takes six seconds to open up a list of the target's lootable equipment, and the looter can be interrupted during this time. This is to ensure that players do not do "run-by" lootings, and the dead character's allies can keep the husk safe from looting if they pay attention. The looting character can take a portion of the unequipped items in the victim's inventory, plus equipped items that are not threaded; whatever unthreaded items the killer does not make off with are destroyed.
There's really no reason to present a list of the target's lootable equipment unless you're going to allow the looter to select items from that list.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's really no reason to present a list of the target's lootable equipment unless you're going to allow the looter to select items from that list.
It could just be a delightful tease...
It was so much more fun when our first response to "random" was to wonder what kinds of useless crap we could carry to ruin a bandit's day. I now wonder whether we crowd-forged our way into the "list" idea :).
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There's really no reason to present a list of the target's lootable equipment unless you're going to allow the looter to select items from that list.It could just be a delightful tease...
It was so much more fun when our first response to "random" was to wonder what kinds of useless crap we could carry to ruin a bandit's day. I now wonder whether we crowd-forged our way into the "list" idea :).
Hmmm this in interesting.
I like the premise based on the fact that it will help make killing someone and looting them more appealing in general, as due to the fact that upon killing you can choose 1 of a given randomset of unthreaded pieces of equipment the person had instead of just getting whatever the RNG wants to throw at you. This will help reduce the amount of garbage that someone loots that they have no use for.
Example: A Wizard get told to Stand and Deliver, and as a CN Evoker specialist, the would be fully armored bandit is now a smoldering pile of ash. In the random loot scenario there is a decent chance to loot his full plate, exotic weapon, or other piece of otherwise useless gear. In the system where loot is presented to the looter and a choice is given then the player will almost certainly be able to find something among his gear that he can put to use such as a Wondrous Item, a Potion, or maybe some armored Bracers.
The same can be said about Fighter types looting casters, as they wont share very many keywords between items, a random situation would only serve to force the winner to try and find someone else to pawn his goods off on, which is in-itself a whole different skillset.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But it sounds like the current thinking is that the looter should get to choose:
When looting a husk, it takes six seconds to open up a list of the target's lootable equipment, and the looter can be interrupted during this time. This is to ensure that players do not do "run-by" lootings, and the dead character's allies can keep the husk safe from looting if they pay attention. The looting character can take a portion of the unequipped items in the victim's inventory, plus equipped items that are not threaded; whatever unthreaded items the killer does not make off with are destroyed.There's really no reason to present a list of the target's lootable equipment unless you're going to allow the looter to select items from that list.
I would actually say that this in no way precludes it being a random selection. Say you have 30 items on you that are unthreaded. The enemy loots your husk and six seconds later a window pops up with a random selection of 8 of those. The enemy can take all, some, or none of those.
@Dario that is certainly how Eve works, you get a window when you loot the wreck which contains a random selection.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It was so much more fun when our first response to "random" was to wonder what kinds of useless crap we could carry to ruin a bandit's day. I now wonder whether we crowd-forged our way into the "list" idea :).
Yeah, I was reminded of those, too :)
Here's Viga Doom doing some Crowdforging before we knew we could:
Here's an emergent player behavior in response to the looting system that you might want to consider. If I know that anyone killing me will get a random sample of things from my bag as a reward, then I will make sure my bags are always full of worthless crap ("rocks", for shorthand). As I find things I want to loot, I'll replace the rocks with the better loot; until I eventually get somewhere to sell my haul. This doesn't help me save any of my loot if I'm killed, but it does reduce the chance that my killer was rewarded for that behavior. It would also be very annoying having to constantly move the rocks around.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think the intent of that quote was that you'd open up the inventory of the random stuff that could be looted. Since you may not want to take it all (encumbrance, etc.) you'll get to pick what if anything you swipe.
Ryan, would you mind telling us your thoughts on why selecting from a random list is preferable? Specifically with reference to the emergent behavior Viga Doom mentioned in my quote above?
Is it just a matter of trying to make sure that looting other players isn't so attractive that players kill other players just for the chance to loot something cool?
@Nihimon
If I have 30 items and you can loot any 10 of those then you will tend to select the highest value items (assuming there is nothing you overwhelmingly want but even in that case it is still likely to be a highe value item)
The top 10 value items will often be a good 60 to 70% of the total value carried therefore reducing the item sink to the other 30% (yes it is a guesstimate)
However with random selection the average item destruction in value terms will over the long term trend to 70%.
Basically random drops will be easier to balance out as a sink. That I think is a good reason to think random is better. People neglect the value of a good value sink for a game.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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As Ryan noted, it was never really a change in how looting worked, just that the addition of encumbrance means that you might not always want to take everything you're entitled to so it made sense to give you a list rather than just dumping it into your inventory.
From the economy side, as ZenPagan notes, there probably not much of an advantage to destroying most of the items if you're keeping the most valuable ones.
From a player experience side, if you kill me, loot me, and only want some of the things you're entitled to loot, I might actually return to my husk and be able to recover items (which may have more value to me than they did to you). (We'll still be destroying some or all of the items you're NOT entitled to loot when you take items, but at least the player can recover something if you don't take everything.)
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To be fair, if you make encumbrance something that can be written off with something like a Bag of Holding that CANNOT be lost (Think putting the bag into the appropraite slot in every single MMO ever) then I cannot envision ANY players not simply looting 100% of the what they can for Player Husks.
I guess my concern here is that if a system is put in place that lets players ignore the encumbrance system then that will invalidate the whole point of the system in the first place.
TL:DR Bags of holding should NOT be able to be threaded, otherwise encumbrance will be meaningless to any players who aren't brand new to the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To be fair, if you make encumbrance something that can be written off with something like a Bag of Holding that CANNOT be lost (Think putting the bag into the appropraite slot in every single MMO ever) then I cannot envision ANY players not simply looting 100% of the what they can for Player Husks.
I guess my concern here is that if a system is put in place that lets players ignore the encumbrance system then that will invalidate the whole point of the system in the first place.
TL:DR Bags of holding should NOT be able to be threaded, otherwise encumbrance will be meaningless to any players who aren't brand new to the game.
I expect bags of holding will work differently in PFO. They will probably give you additional encumbrance, rather than being a volume of slots to freely fill. And remember, they will take up one of your two wonderous item slots, so there is an opportunity cost for having them. Specifically, all the other awesome things that could go in those very limited slots.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So if the husk owner manages to get back to the body do they get to recover everything? ... or just a random selection like you get with a destroyed ship in EVE.
From the sound of it, your items fall into the following categories.
1) Threaded items: Go with you on death
2) Unthreaded items: Break down into the following groups
__i)Unlootable: Instantly destroyed when the husk is looted. Recoverable if husk is unlooted
__ii)Lootable: These remain on your husk. Your killer can loot them OR someone else can loot them (and get the thief flag) OR you can return and claim any that are not taken by anyone else.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Okay, thanks Ryan and Stephen (and Zen!) for clearing that up for me. I guess I was thinking there would probably be some kind of cap on what the looter was able to loot based on the Tier of the items being looted or something like that.
I'm still curious about the behavior Viga Doom described, and how (or even if) you plan to deal with it. I really don't want to have to fill my inventory with "rocks"...
@Nihimon
Just a lucky guess on my side really from looking at why you only get a portion rather than everything. On the rocks issue, while you could certainly do as suggested, I am not sure you wouldn't be unnecessarily hurting yourself more by the strategy.
Certainly it is a strategy that could be applied in Eve as well and occasionally people do but the practice does not appear widespread
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Filling your inventory up with trash items might infuriate the PKers, but if encumbrance and movement speed make it into the game, it's going to annoy those doing it also.
This.
Carrying a sack full of low-quality goods with your actual valuables hidden beneath them seems like a completely viable real world strategy if you think you're going to be robbed. Since your load of encumbering camouflage probably made it easier for the bandits to catch you and doesn't guarantee they won't get your stuff due to luck of the draw anyway, it should hopefully be a self-balancing strategy.