goods grouping with evils

[Davairus]

Lorne thinks this should be discussed on forums instead of immediately trashed so I put it here.

Some examples of things we could discuss

- there are ambigiously neutral looking evils, aka all avians, training their skills to 100% and getting loaded at the trading post going and silent dunking healers instead of inviting them to grouping.
- level 50 warrior OOC power levelling his evil/good buddies in the same group with level-down cakes. "kinda cool"

What else is there to discuss? reply whatever you want. i want your raw honesty

[Olyn]

I would have been EXTREMELY pissed if you reverted this without a serious discussion.

Please read original update forum here: http://abandonedrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8514

As far as I can tell, this has been extremely well received and added tons of RP opportunities in the almost 7 years since we implemented it.

[Davairus]

I already begun the discussion right ? Youve nothing to be angry about. Not sure what you are worked up about. Was this your idea?

Two examples of abuse are in my post and they both really suck.

[Olyn]

You seemed to imply in your post that you would have just reverted this without a discussion if Lorne hadn't suggested bringing it to the forum. I think I implemented this based on my presence in the forum thread I linked above, but I don't remember for sure. If I didn't make the change, I know I was in favor of it when we discussed it.

I prefer to put the power of decision in players' hands where possible. As in, I would much rather have the good-aligned player choose whether or not to group with an evil-aligned player than simply have code prevent it altogether. There's opportunities for goods to try to convert evils or Valour Nobles getting to know an Oathed evil while out on a hunt, evils to try to manipulate goods in their rise to power, Justices banding together to reach 50 or defend their cabal or something, etc., etc.

To address the two points that you brought up:

1) We have fairly good mechanics for players to detect evil in-person if they want, like looking at their gear or the detect evil spell (also on the readily available clear potion). It's possible we may benefit from players having access to that information from a distance as well. Indicators on the who list, like a color code, may be appropriate if we decide to go that route.

2) I think those eat-me cakes are a separate issue. I don't particularly like them, but they also seem fairly popular with the players. A lot of players have multiple high level characters, so I'm not sure that alignment is much of a factor in ooc leveling abuse with those cakes when they can just pull out a different option from their golf bag of characters to rank their buddy. I wouldn't be opposed to removing cakes or changing the way they work based on player input.

[Davairus]

Ok. I’ll be the bad guy and remove the cakes. I actually am sure we will see balance issues in the lower levels bubbling up from that, which we can rinse through patch cycles.

Color codes on the who list with detect evil/good up will clear my concerns with the pk ranges.

[Lorne]

Maybe with the cakes, we can nerf them by allowing only 1 cake, not allowing level 50s dropping down to 20. Or another option can be...level 50s can't actually buy the cakes themselves, so if like a level 40 wants help, they have to go buy it...at least that allows some RP interaction to happen.

If people going to OOC, they gonna OOC, but I do see the cakes yesterday in actual RP instances. I've used it many times to help noobs/lowbies/fitting RPs myself and also have been on the receiving end of help with RP interactions.

[Lorne]

I have never had an issue of not knowing who is evil/good/neutral in my who pk range. The select few outliers of human warrior or avian illusionist etc., it'll only take me one look to realize which side they're on. At the very least I can remove one alignment if not both (ie. they're wearing something anti-good and anti-neutral, Red Claw Signet rings for example).

[Andrael]

doesn't the 'know alignment' spell tell you all the info as long as the person is on the realms at the time? Or does it require the two of them to be in the same room? I know that all 'dedicated' spell casters tend to get the spell.

[Baer]

Anyone online, from anywhere.

[Davairus]

As I said I do think the colours in who pk (on detect evil) will address my every concern. That allows the paladin to be able to log on and type who pk and go kill people. Not to waste time spamming know alignment every time they log in. its a valid and time-honored pk strategy to log out with your spells fully refreshed and be ready for a suicide dive straight into the emerald forest. So what if its a bit trashy? Its fun. Also, as a paladin you WILL get outcasted for assisting evil. I cannot do that "RP enforcement" if it is not totally easy for them to see they are doing it wrong.


Cakes are totally unnecessary. You have surges, able to group with the opposite alignment, guild commisions, overlord kills, monster healing pots and monster regen pots, pets that kick dirt, no penalty for pets in group, and if my info is correct, no penalty for a level 50 in the group. so you can basically have 1 person grouped with 5-6 caked down level 50s and max exp, and the 50s get all of the exp as gold, which is super easy million gold. i think that is true mainly because I saw a group do that and took a guy from level 30 to 50 in under 3 hours. for that matter, most mobs are a lot softer than they used to be. A lot. The twice-bitten butlers dont kick dirt anymore, ettins dont wander rooms anymore, fire giant soldiers to spam icicle on. Every mob I check has a vuln now. Someone actually asked me the other day, as a level 30, "Where should i go level, emerald is too hard now" correct answer is get someone caked down enough to do blood shamans for you wearing a full set of level 50 winter gear. The other way to go is grab a 5/5 enchant with your warlord medals and complain that fighting overlords for that was taking too long/ all of the above stuff makes it seem really kinda pointless to even do anything about cakes at this point, but theyre definitely not necessary.

I really preferred the harder levelling. It makes me more inclined to want to do it. It makes every point of it feel more earned. It used to be a real achievement to get to 50. It might even be the case that we shed players when the challenge lowered considerably, which would mean all of the above is very foolish. But the cakes is just super obvious bad.
We can think of a fun way to change it if you guys want to.

[hamsandwich]

I won't say I'm for or against making leveling harder, I'll have to think about it more, but I will say that Dav is absolutely right that it's way super easier now. 12-15 years ago I remember it taking forever to get to 50. Part of it was difficulty finding a group (which has been addressed numerous ways since) and part of it was that killing the mobs was way harder and you only got like 300 exp per kill on the forest five. Now you get like 1300 even at level 49. Shit's insane

[Matrix]

[quote]That allows the paladin to be able to log on and type who pk and go kill people. Not to waste time spamming know alignment every time they log in.[/quote]

because their alignment changes every time they log in right? And there are so many characters it's totally impossible for a paladin to remember which guy slaughtered all those innocents. You're right we totally need this change. 10/10 would comment again

[Vhrael]

The fact that you see so many 50’s delete after 1-2 deaths with no extreme reason is proof enough that leveling is too easy and not taken seriously.

[Davairus]

Last week, I fixed an unreported bug that was allowing the guild banner reward to stack with the surge and the overlord bonus. Level 40 players getting over 6000 experience in one shot. I also fixed a bug that was literally reducing all overlord damage by 30%. This is completely unacceptable. Consider it progress that we are at the point I am even willing to discuss this. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure if you look in your six months old code the bugs are still there. Trust me, my patience was fucking OUT before I started this thread, and I am doing the best I can to hold discussion. The last thing I want is to LOWER the quality of levelling. But that would take some doing. Its been literally impossible to log on a day later into the same pk range.
There are so many things that make levelling easy, that I forgot to mention the dagger that is circulating around that increases your exp by 20%.

[Merlandox]

Cakes were introduced when player base was low. At that time you cant find a decent group in your range for weeks and solo levelling is retarded IMO and it still is.

If I'm not wrong at that time pets/merc gives u more exp as a second groupmate. (I cld be wrong)

Hurray, covid-19, everyone stays home and player base surged. Great. What happens after when pbase drops back to 2 person online at a time and it takes you 2 weeks to even find someone in grouping range once again?

[Davairus]

i think its fairly obvious merlandox we'll just hand you a free level 50 in a doggy bag along with the last piece of leftover cake
the solo ranking is fun right now

[Merlandox]

I'll take it if you will hand me one. Do I submit the name/class/race of my choice? Thanks in advance!

[Merlandox]

Btw this was discussed in a 2018 thread. What changed to levelling other than pbase increase since then?

[Davairus]

Merlandox, with all due respect, I had to explain to you how heavenly wrath breaks down vs warrior hp, damage and defenses. It was like talking to a brick wall the whole time. Lets not go down the path of growing angry at each other. You can scroll up a few posts and see that I already broke it down for you how easy it is to level. I did not intend just include everything, but since you need more info, there are some quests in the game that just require killing stuff. Like, kill 10 goblins, 8 guards, 1 chieftain. And when you finish doing that, the amount of exp you get is basically the same as the exp from all the killing you did. That's double exp. If you aren't taking that, it speaks for itself how easy exp'ing is. On top of THAT, there are incidental quests in those areas that just involve moving around and looking at shit. Mud school, goblins, graveyard, grand thalos are the areas I go to. There's fucking loads of those quests below level 15, and soloing all the way up to level 20 is decently fun. There is also some mob in the game that scales to match your level, and it is designed for you to be able to kill it without fleeing at any level. At a small but significant trickle, there is exp from walking into areas that resets every couple weeks, which last I remember was like 50-100 exp a pop, and since there are 100 areas, .. do the math, bro, my last character levelled from 42 to 45 on that without killing a single thing. If that dont say levelling isnt super easy, I don't know what the fuck will convince you. I regularly added more quests because I enjoy writing them for you.

I don't blame you guys for wanting to power rank because there is a PK record reset at level 36. It was communicated to you that the game does not "count" until level 36. I think an under 30's bracket to fuck around in may add a lot of value and retarded fun to AR. I personally would rather like to be fooling around in low (approx 30) levels more than trying to make a 50 and run straight into players with cabal powers and practice right away. We have tournaments and we don't have to limit it to exclusively level 50, we can have a regular level 30 or even level 15 newbie tourney. Perhaps you guys could stop raging into keyboards a minute and we can just think about whether we would like to create a proving grounds to test a character against other cabal / autoinduct / whatever characters. That way you can use cake for what I originally had in mind for it and enter the level 30 tournament with a cake. All of the code needed is complete.

[Merlandox]

I'm cool dav. I'm not about to get angry with anyone. I hardly get angry over proper discussions. We each have our opinion and although I disagree with some of yours, it's normal, that includes the talk on wrath but I will just take your opinion on it. I honestly didn't know about all the quest changes.

My idea of solo ranking has always been killing dryads/nymphs/rangers alone and the exp gain solo was quite crappy and it was a grind. I would rather go play another game rather than solo rank if I'm gonna kill 2000 rangers alone, thus I asked the question. It's cool, you guys know better. Honestly, I don't really care about the cakes. Just pointing out potential issues. I'll leave the forum if it angers you.