Latest batch of cabal changes

[Davairus]

UPDATED

Putting in the battlefield for documentation reasons. If you already know all these things, feel free to disregard them.

Read the next post for new information.
The following is dated information (kept for archive purposes):

[Davairus]

Group kiling Guideline updates

Based on feedback from my group warfare thread (thank you to everyone who participated) and also on how the events play out in game, I've made a few changes here which are needed.

Group warfare discussion here: http://abandonedrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2283

Since Burzuk's note to cabals scrolled off the page we've lost what it originally contained and there's no actual rules in existence to enforce for, and well, we can't agree on what it said anymore (for example, I remember it said that only one person can attack a cabal guardian at a time, and that we also wanted to make sure Legions didnt go gangbang-happy, which is meant well but seems to make things generally uneven and leaves Legion pwnt and empty).

Here were the major problems as I identified them, and the fixes I decided:

1. Different views
2. Nitpicking and bitching

It turns out all that I needed to do, was to make a cabal's group warfare policies a person cabal issue.

1) Different views. Because cabals are different, with different set-ups, skills, and approaches to their goals, it follows that some things will necessitate group warfare for that cabal, and others don't.

For example, a Justice is a powerful, peaceful cabal. For this reason, they aren't allowed to aggravate people with attacks, but the flipside is, if you aggravated a Justice, he's within his bounds to bring a posse. This has already been defined very well, so I have ensured that there will be no change in the conduct of Justices.

On the other hand a Warlord is a powerful individual, who can defeat multiple foes alone without even needing sancs. Its very potent with the new combat skills. They make little sense group fighting ever, other than when retrieving their item calls for it. Again, I don't expect any change here.

Then there are the Legion and Justice cabals:-

Legion is a cabal that requires its members to show strength, being a group of the most powerful evils in the game. So they have some guidelines to basically stop them from getting out of hand. It's trickier to define whats wrong for a Legion, but basically, outnumbered gangbangs here can be seen as a sign of incompetence, and removing incompetence from Legion is good for the cabal as whole. A lot of the decay is removed from Legion with the vendetta/contract set-ups. However, grouping to even the numbers (especially when instigating attacks against caballed gangers), is usually reasonable, and needs to be accounted for. Its close to being ok when they work together. Its definitely not ok when they gang with people who haven't even purchased protection. The rules that we have are a good match for the Legion cabal, pretty much, just needs a little tweaking and it should be working quite fine.

Obviously that's nothing like what Justice or Warlord is like.

Knights is where things really began to run into serious problems. Basically, a Knight has his virtuous codes of courage and loyalty, and they butt heads on a situational basis. Being Lightwalkers, they're supposed to either help others out in times of great need, or get outcasted. This is the premise upon which Knights exists - it is their core. Now this doesn't apply to kicking the shit out of somebody all the time. But kicking the shit out of somebody, because they have trapped someone else in mortal danger, is fine there. And kicking the shit out of somebody, because damnit, he's a badass they can't destroy, and he's killing a lot of people (i.e. character on a kill streak) also works out them. Basically, Knights afford more relaxed freedoms with outnumbering opponents because they're Lightwalkers, who're trying to subdue trouble-makers, not actually create trouble for others. So that makes them the designated cabal for escalating minor cabal conflicts into group-oriented assignments. Remember that evils are instigators, not Knights, before you spaz that this is uneven. Remember, also, that Knights are expected to play fair, and this wouldnt just happen for the pure joy of it like Legion would do. Remember, also, that Knights get themselves wanted because of evil Justices, they rarely are on good terms with all the Justices, so inter-cabal gangbanging is pretty damn rare indeed.

Being able to disrupt levelling and eq gathering is especially important for Knights & Legions, with them being so obviously opposed. And its not always combat-oriented disruption here, it can also be done by loading up the cabal's other enemies (like Justices) with eq.




These are rough sketches of how the cabals set-up, just to illustrate why each cabal's nuances require them to make their own group warfare policy. I have left it up to the Immortal leader to set the policy, as I'm confident they can work these policies out properly, no doubt better than I can.

Basically, if you feel a certain way about ganging, you'll go join the cabal that fits you best, and you'll be happy in your cabal. And other people in their cabals will be happy in theirs. And you'll know they're your enemies in more ways than just different skills and have some idea of what to expect. Instead of this current model, which was a noble effort but really isn't right for anyone (Justice already operates under its own rules) and consequently nobody is happy.

Its important that every cabal takes a different approach to this so that the cabal's remain unique. So if you see crap like Legion saying "well we should gang coz we're evils and we dont play fair" and Knight saying "well we should gang coz we're Lightwalkers and we work together" or any cabal saying "well we should be able to gang whenever we like to make everyone/criminals/evils scared"...you need to speak up and say that's bullshit. Doesnt matter who said it. Diversity is necessary here period, as is some degree of fairness, so that things remain even.

2. Nit-picking and bitching

Short and simple here. Because this goes into a cabal's guidelines, you can't nitpick them easily as an outsider. Also, its a mortal/cabal immortal issue, not a high level immortal one, so there's probably no point bitching to a high level imm about it. They're going to say, "eh, not my problem, go take it up with their cabal". In short, the stage is yours, and you're trusted to play responsibly, within whatever rules your leader decides. (You are welcome to bitch at that leader if you don't like them, or get your own mortal leader to have some clout.. or heck, oust their leader yourself if he's particularly disgusting. Condeaths are there for a reason.)


Now.. for closing words: I reserve the right to use my discretion, incase unforeseen things come up that are not accounted for (one example is a Justice spamming mass-flags, obviously I'd need to deal with that). But generally I'm letting cabal imms tailor their group warfare philosophies. I'm expecting they're mature enough to come up with something reasonable that makes good use of the flags that have been coded for the help, but like I said, point out any BS to them, and if they try to make things convenient for themselves, I'd expect every other cabal to respond in kind... 3 cabals > 1 cabal.

[formalism]

[_Clifton_]

Okay, I'm going to take a look at it from a cabal vs cabal perspective. Inherent conflicts with cabal flags.

Warlords vs all

Warlords do their thing, it's all well and good. They're usually avoided and stay out of most conflicts. They just show off by beating everyone senseless. If they get too powerful, they'll probably get ganked by legion. But, they're a neutral cabal.

Justices vs all

Don't mess with Justice, they don't mess with you. But you mess with Justice, they come after you full force. Pretty much, Wanted=Death. Fairly simple.

Knights vs Evil

vs Legion
Okay, fairly simple here. You can one vs one or two vs two style. Basically, it's usually just an even group battle. And eventually turns into a trade off of flags. Anathema'd -> Contract'd -> Anathema'd. Fun battle, some gankins probable. Otherwise, invade and wait for fights there. Easy enough. Some cheese is expect since it's classic good vs evil.

vs. Warlord
Warlords are neutral, usually nothing to happen except fighting

vs. Justice
Here's a toughie. What do you do with Evil Justices. If you go fight an Evil Justice that's town sitting. It's going to turn into a gangbang (eventually). Pretty much, attack an evil justice = wanted = gang = dead. Hopefully, you can gank him when he's out of town, but that's not so likely (recalls galore). So best way to go about it is to invade if he's solo, at least you won't have a flag that way. But do it with more than one justice, it's still a ganging. So it's 1 vs gang -- seems a bit unfair. difference between invading justice and invading legion is that after initial invasion, only one member of Legion can pursue you (via group combat), whereas Justices will use full force. Logically, this consistent disregard for Cabal Sanctity brews into something bigger. And no sensible player is going to get himself ganged into oblivion. -- I can't see any way to bypass 1 vs gang scenario that comes up here.

Legion vs All

Legion is like mix of mafia and gangsta. Firstly, you have people that you dominate as a group (protecteds) and then you want to dominate your little cult (infighting for promotion). Pretty much you got a dysfunctional family mentality.

vs Knights
Effectively same thing as Knights vs. Legion. Maybe a bit more traps and deceptive tactics. But basically, it'll be group vs group or 1 vs 1 with except of flags. That and you go around trying to mess them up.

vs Warlords
You gang contracted warlords, and then pick on warlords for fun. Or rather, to make their lives miserable. that makes you an enemy and there's some fun occurances that take place. Basically, you get 1 on 1 fights (or Warlord gankings) since Warlords are about Honor and Decency.

vs Justice
Effecitvely the same thing as Knights. It will turn into a 1 vs gang with the difference being able to flag the Justice that killed you. Eventually, all justices get flagged and the whole thing turns into nice big group warfare with other enemies you've made as a Legion jumping in. (really quite fun actually). But it will be very difficult to have one vs one unless they're already contracted.



I'm sure I'm missing out on some points, but that's all I could think of at the moment. Thoughs, reflections are appreciated.

[Davairus]

[Hoarding Healer]

Maybe have henchmens stronger and/or not affected by maledictions...kinda dumb when someone comes in and spells up your henchmen with blind and then it just sits idle.

[Davairus]

Latest changes for cabals are as follows.

Policy

VS uncaballed

Even evil cabals are expected to give uncaballed an even fight. This is for two good reasons.

1) cabal characters have extra powers
2) uncaballed characters don't have an easy way to remove those powers

Hence cabals are not permitted to use excessive force on people who are unaffiliated. This means, basically.. no outmatched gangbangs on uncaballed targets, it has to be even teams. So, if you prefer your flavour of play solo/even, we have the rules to keep it that way.


That said, there is the issue of flags. If you bear a cabal's flag (anathema, contract, wanted, deathmark) they are permitted to use full force to relieve you of it. So even though you have the protection usually, you still shouldnt piss off cabals without backup.

How to incur flags:

Anathema - noble-witnessed Valour attacks, killing non-Knight Valourians
Contract - someone bought one, killing protected
Wanted - failed to pay fines, Justice witnessed attack in Seringale
Deathmark - not sure about that off-hand.

Vs. Caballed

I previously stated that I want this to be a cabal issue, and it still will be. It is something a cabal's leader can define. However due to the extreme grinding slowness of things I made up some *provisional* guidelines for each cabal, to fall back on until you guys come up with something better. And also, if you decide someday you dont like what you invented, you can fall back on these things. Here we go.

Warlord: No groups.
Knight: May group vs caballed evils.
Justice: May group vs people who provoke them. *
Legion: May group vs any cabal

* extends to unaffiliated

When everything lies default, its evil who causes the group killing, there is the aggressive "kill everyone" Legion cabal and the defensive "turtle style" Justice cabal, which unfortunately means running into trouble with Legion too, so if you want to stir it up.. pick one of those.

Lowbie cabal imms can redefine their rules but they cannot make them any worse than these basic things here. And ..you will have to be in the cabal to know them. So I guess assume the worst.

Skills/Powers etc

Abduct/Ensnare/Imprison

These no longer work on caballed characters. So there's a huge reason to join a cabal if you needed one. However, if your item gets captured, they'll work on you regardless of whether you have a flag or not. A bit of a double-edged sword for you, but take heart in knowing if someone captures your item, they immediately incur your flag too.


Damnation

Instead of damnation for quit with item out, you will incur the enemy's flag instead. This is more fair, because the enemy had to take a flag to capture your item, and damnation just gets waited off. Items should return to altars by themselves if nobody is on pk on each side, but this will take some time. Its more of a safeguard against preventing people from grabbing items before anyone even logs in, since that abuses lowbies too much.


The astute of you will realise that this puts a LOT more emphasis into the strategy of stealing people's cabal items, and getting them back.

Few other odds and ends

Anathema protection no longer covers Knights.
Regen in cabals restored to 50% instead of being nil.
Beefier warlord altar guardian, because Warlords with lost powers are really screwed.
Dagnir now only attacks BOUNTIED if a Justice is in that particular criminals pk. (We dont want Justice to get bullied excessively, but neither to just turtle at Dagnir like theyve been doing)
Can no longer summon people who hold cabal items.


Upcoming

Altar guards scaling based on numbers.
Some new skills for Justice & Legion - stay tuned.

[marsd]

Ehhh, what about group caballed vs caballed + unaffliated?

[Davairus]

Few odds-and-ends:

Squires can now see anathemas.
Protected can now see (and collect) contracts.
Legion can only group with protecteds (and other evils)... they're the "big boss" type version of the protected, like Knights are for squires.

[Davairus]

Latest and greatest:

General

Henchman can now attack uncaballed out-of-pk intruders. This is to make up for the vulnerability of having a cabal to attack, which the uncaballed do not suffer.

Abduct, Ensnare, Imprison, etc, require flags to be used again. Being in a cabal still means you are immune to those skills - unless the item is stolen. Allowing these to work on someone who lost their item was a little overboard though.

Knights

Main changes here are to the nobles, who as you know are an RP machine for the Knights. I've decided to eliminate the total pacifism as there hasn't been anyone really willing to make characters that lead "stainless" lives. Though its still quite restricted:

* nobles can now "pardon" anathema (you must petition for forgiveness)
* nobles can be part of an anathema-hunting posse; they are not encouraged to pursue anathema on their own, however, and non-anathema remains completely forbidden

Legion

Dark arrow - gone.
Tainted sacrifice - back and improved.


Some notes on tainted sacrifice.

Primary purpose: Tainting your fallen enemy's carcass

This maximises your reward for killing, because it "taints" objects that have the anti-evil flag. The taint remains until a non-Legion touches the item. For example, if Rigwarl pk's Jaran, and taints the corpse, he'll be able to loot and use Jaran's supposed "good only" rares. Until Rigwarl is killed and looted by non-Legion, those "good only" items will remain property of Legion, passable btween Legions.. if the item enters the hands of a non-Legion at any point, however, the taint is stripped. Thieves can come in quite handy here.

I don't foresee problems with Legion's hoarding "good only" rares excessively, they're a small group and a cabal is required to play actively. However, I do foresee this causing problems for good aligns that aren't very good and hoard a lot of rares, since for Legion that's a bag of free eq. This is the first time I've created something really focused at taking out hoarders.

You'll be interested to learn how this interacts with the new anti-align looting codes, I'm going to leave that for you to find out for yourselves.

Legion-on-Legion action:
1) It can be used to coup ranks.
2) Rank difference doesn't matter, it'll take one rank from the higher and award one rank to the lower.
3) It works on the cabal leader.

Also, there are safeguards in place to make sure that tainted sacrifice can only be used on Legion kills, so if you want to use it, you'll have to get the kill yourself. These safeguards also apply to soul capture.

[Sethronu]

when a non-legion loots the tainted item, the taint is stripped -- meaning it turns into anti-evil again and is zapped off the non-caballed's inventory? or meaning he and anyone else later can wear it?

[Davairus]

I don't wish to answer too much questions about the looting, but I will confirm that if a non-Legion loots the Legion's tainted items, it will remove the taint and then zap them if appropriate.

[Ashr]

[Davairus]

Newest updates, these are for Knights.

1) Being "protected" isn't good enough to contract a Knight when you get pked. Its the same as, being Valour hometown isn't good enough to anathema a Legion when you get pked. But you can still contract them with Vinnie with enough gold, just like nobles can still anathema aggressive evils in Valour.

2) Legions can't vendetta Knights when they're pked. I added this in because there's an obvious imbalance in power with Legions able to harass levelling groups of Knights with impunity, and Knights not able to respond in kind due to getting contracted. One solution would have been to make a way to anathema for killing Knights too, but that's intimidating, and not Knight style. So they're just shielded from it.

3) Knights roll sheet now just displays anathemas, with the "rank" being dependent on how many anathema kills they've done. So if you fall off the board, just get a new anathema flag and you're good to go again.

[Jamus]

Vendetta? I think Mongtufa was this once or twice, but I never really knew what it was. Kind of like bounty is super wanted, vendetta is super contracted?

[Davairus]

General updates.

1) Can't confine if your cabal has a dead entrance guardian.
2) Can outfit at shop (deducts from bank).

[Davairus]

* no more bounty for WANTED cabal character killing Justice, because this makes cabal conflicts endure longer than they should
* nobles no longer add anathema, instead it flags automatically when a noble is attacked in Valour. They can still remove anathema
* "intruder" now has a steadily increasing fine, which if is allowed to elapse beyond the maximum fineable amount, will result in a wanted flag. This is so Justices won't have to bother with a wild goose chase outside town all over Thera, just over a temporary flag. This resolves some controversial aggression problems.
* new "oath" command has been made available for uncaballed evils to opt out of the Valour/Knight pk'ing. This is because Knights have adopted an extremist "pk every evil" philosophy, and this ensures there is still some interacting instead of just an asshat pk fest. Knights are required to tell you to take the oath before they try to silent pk you (its sort of like the "protection" idea, but with a unique spin on it - you're simply promising to leave people alone). Cabal characters cannot be oathed.


Oath command
- its free of charge
- use it at the altar of Light in Valour
- only Valour lightwalkers can see who is oathed
- if you are killed by a Lightwalker, they will get exiled from Valour, which results in loss of ability to request Valour rares/items (which is a numerous amount of them)
- if you attack anybody from Valour, that's breaking the oath, so you're flagged anathema instantly
(its more forgiving for good attacking evil, because not all lightwalkers are from Valour anyway)

Changes are subject to change, keep yourself updated.

[Davairus]

Altars no longer require keys, they are just guarded by the altar guardian. So if you want to protect your item, try to stop your altar guardian from getting killed. And if you want to save it from being captured, you'll just have to grab it yourself.

In other words:
* No more "sac key".

[Davairus]

Latest and Greatest..? Not really.

1) Bounty

Bounties will be incurred for killing Justice while wanted, again, for caballed characters. This is because we neglected to consider you could spam kill Justices all day and then just pay the flag off. Cough.

Incase you're not up-to-date on the Justice cabal mechanic, here it is again...

Raiders perspective:
You raid the cabal, and you have an intruder flag. The Justices are not required to chase an intruder, but they are required to defend the cabal. It just makes it a bit difficult to sleep up in town, since you won't be protected there. Now, while intruder, you'll be fined, growing gradually, and that'll turn into wanted after it gets too big (I think this takes about.. 80 minutes..something like that). So essentially, its a song and dance, and most of the time someone's getting flagged if they're to kill a Justice, which for at least one ethos is also payable.

Justices perspective:
Not allowed to raid other cabals unless theyre wanted/bountied, have to defend cabal, can attack people outside town on "personal agendas", but not in numbers unless its on official cabal business (like the guy is an intruder). People won't want to take a flag trying to kill you because it costs a bomb to pay off and a lynching if they dont. If a Justice wants to start some "fun", he has to leave town, fight solo, and thats about it.

2) Tether

This is a new skill for Knights, it works only upon anathema targets, so don't panic too much just yet.. I've been considering the flags/skills setup and what I'd like for Knights is, not too easy to get made anathema by them, but they sure have some nice stuff to take care of those guys in the event it happens. This new ability will help a lot, but it can be used against them, remember that. I'm going to let people discover what it does themselves first.

Now the agenda for Knights, AFAIK, is they're forced to be aggressive toward ALL evils that refuse oaths. And apparently, they also ignore oathed people killing non-Valour Lightwalkers. Which I don't really feel happy about, so ... probably thats about it for Knight skills, til Combat Module C arrives and mounts get reworked. Might have a little more work to do on their anathema flag mechanism, and definitely on nobles, around about religion module.

3) Spy

I've made this require cabal item captured for caballed targets, since cabals already have a place theyre forced to return to for a fight, without having to worry about being exposed to a spy gank on top. If your victims in a cabal, you obviously know where to go to find them. For Legions, what we have is a situation where the cabal just vendettas the killer a couple times if they lose a life, and then they've got a contract without ever taking an item, which Legion then ignores til it suits them. What I'd like to see is the Legionnaires mode of flag collection is to focus on capturing a cabal item first, incurring a flag if successful, and spitefully sending their enemy on their way to a flag of their own if they can't manage it. With the capturing changes, I'm pretty sure they can do that. The good thing about this was it means I don't need Knights to be immune to vendettas anymore, since Legions are benign til they take flags. Especially lowbie Legions. Should work out well for Legion to have a few gimp underlings losing/vendetta'ing Knights, and kamikaze rogues to capture items then try to hide and lay low while the decent Legions work on knocking them out with abducts. *breathes, finally*

Since I've made Legion the most dependent cabal on item capture now, at least vs other cabals, I'm considering additional skills that they'll only gain from having items captured, but work vs everyone..

4) cabal /altar /guild guardians

Damage against these mobs now scales against amount of people fighting them.. a small penalty for 2, and a large penalty for 3+. They also won't be swinging anymore. The reason for this is that, it shouldn't be too easy to take out a guardian without fleeing when you're also tanking a cabal member. They'll get a shot at confining this way.

[Davairus]

Nobles now have a shop where they can buy restringed items, i.e.: