Things you'd like to see in 2008.

[Davairus]

This is a list of things you would like to see introduced into AR in 2008. I guess you can list up just about anything you want, post multiple times if you need to do that to get the creative juices flowing. Any sort of idea, as wild or outlandish as you like.

Here are a couple of examples (doesn't mean it would happen!):

Combat basics revamped:
- able to walk out of fighting without the flee command, with a guaranteed chance to trip over for any race larger than small.
- very fine spellcasting delays, allow players to hellstream or blind each other at the same time instead of one after the other, for double kills!
- double k.o. also apply to melee'ing
- counterspells (defensive magic), where you cast a spell in anticipation of one coming your way. e.g. 'nature ward' may prevent a plague and drain the caster's mana for attempt.

General fun stuff:
- some areas reworked as "king of the hill" battleground. e.g. capture four towers to grant your alignment a damage or regen bonus in that area
- pk holidays where the pk's count double for rating change, maybe in the surges or something
- many more pk motivators like that
-

Skills..:
- rage gets more wild and crazy, maybe something like blunt absorption to open up other races besides fire/minot, immunity to diseases and blindness during rage, maybe even bash lag, or anything else that can cheese rage. because berserkers going around raging on people fearlessly is fun. (the more passive problems of weapon styles and combat matchups takes care of rage, so dont panic!)
-

yadda yadda you get the idea

[Kalist19]

-Faster ranking (less xp tnl or more surges!)
-New races (Orc, Skeleton, Angel)
-Brawls for the holidays (advself 50, free silver equip)
-Keepers opened up
-Blind/lag immunity for rage sounds awesome
-Rare cap increased
-More skilled vampires (Or the Demons again, that was fun)
-More Imm run quests (remember that 'smash the watermelon' quest a few years ago and the Darkhan/Myria crap) I guess Vanisse runs a lot of 'find the obscure item' quests but stuff involving fighting is fun too
-Some form of payed advertising - I would gladly throw in some cash to get AR's name out there a bit more and I'm sure many people feel the same
-More cabal'd people - the best way to learn the game is to join a cabal and get raped senseless
-New bonuses for capturing enemy cabal item; such as increased xp for holding enemy's item on your cabal guardian (or extra gold for 50's)

[pip]

i think with more cabals it will inspire people to join instead of the normal justice/legion/knights ordeal with could make the new players stray away. i remember warlords being newbie friendly because of the stun battle and it forces them to fight and become better pkers/stalkers- assassins can be secret killers other than the mind numbing job it is to be a legion and piddle fart with knights or buying stupid fucking protection because that the only way they can rank, and another thing for assassins is not having to be bound to cabal defense (lone wolf style) mystics aren't meant to be newbie helpers, just master of magic / nemesis of warlords and gives people a reason to play mages in a neutral kind of standpoint. i think the help for newbies is the heralds and immortals since they don't really have anything else to do except right lame ass stories that no one reads. more to come, have to leave

oh, and bring back the spam training

[Esivole]

bring back warlords.....
thats just my first suggestion.
since that is never going to happen, (and yes I know your busy), get more stuff implemented. keepers, rogue module, mage module.. monks, druids, psions... so on, more areas, easier ranking since the player base is so low, something. more races would be nice too, but... classes first.

[Slade]

Things that were already on the agenda like rogues revamp, druids, invoker tweaks, cleric tweaks, a few more race/class combos from existing race/classes, not high on keepers on paper so I don't really care about that one.

After that bringing back balanced and/or refreshed versions of previously yanked stuff would be cool: psions, warlords, assassins, maybe monk.

When all thats done a few new races and classes would be nice. Yes balance is relatively fantastic right now but I think we can introduce combos needing revamp, yanked stuff not intended for revamp, and even a new one or two, all of that while keeping balance. Just takes a lot of thought and care but it can be done.

Faster and more heavy-handed punishment for ooc'ing, and cabal conduct in general.

[Grayden]

1. werebeast warrior
2. make fist sunday of every month the jump to level 50 and pk day
3. no lag on the person who attempts trip, but no trip spamming(trip limit)
4. make saves better, at aff save 87, hell stream still tore me up
5. multikill protection (if you kill somone they would be protected from you by the gods unless they attack you)
6. damage reduction from slash for thoes illithids who have stone skin cast upon them. (slashing should not hurt stone like squishy normal)
7. maybe a hint for what rare item would have been on the monster (for example, an option that you could toggle so when you killed like the ogre chief and his rares were out, you would get some message like "he is the rightful owner of snot spitter bow, and gauntltes of ogre str, but they were stolen already, or even it could say who has thoes items if the mob dose not.

that should be enough ideas for now.

Grayden Grim of the Bloody Fields of Flesh

[Esura]

-Further character customization options. Have healers, shamans, paladins, and dark-knights pick a deity to worship, which alters their list of spells a little bit. Neutral cleric option for Keepers. Let characters pick little bonuses every ten levels or something. Examples may be 5 percent less experience required to level, or increased carrying capacity, or +1 damroll when using flails, reduced movement required for climbing mountains, or slightly larger tick gains. Obviously you'd have to think about balance, but yeah.
-Make a few pets that can sneak so they don't suck as much for drows.
-Some sort of magical pendant or something that allows you to reduce your level by a chosen amount. All skills above that level are turned off, your hit/dam/savevs.spell goes down by some appropriate amount. So say there's four people on AR, one at 20, one at 30, one at 40, and one at 50, and none of them are in each other's PK or grouping range. Then the three of them could still rank together at level 20, if they really wanted to. Veterans with high ranked characters could use them to interact meaningfully with newbies. Maybe if PK abuse is a problem, make it so that if you've brought yourself into someone's PK range by this method, you can only fight in the arena.
-An actual, cohesive, overarching plot that a new player would just naturally pick up over the course of newbie academy, so when people see Victoria's Needle in Valour they're not like "who the hell is Victoria?".
-Make AC more important. Or, say, give armor a damage reduction value, which is basically like negative damroll for your opponent. Armor is supposed to be for protecting you from harm, not for somehow making your attacks stronger. This way just seems more realistic to me. When two armored warriors fight, and then when one of them loses all of her gear and they fight again, that person should be taking more damage instead of dealing less damage.
-Give armor new attributes. Like the aformentioned damage reduction, immunity/resistance to an element, radically different AC values for bash/pierce/slash/exotic and by radically different I mean like -30 bash and +10 pierce for say, leather armor. Increased/decreased HP/mana tick gains. More stuff that affects luck. A mild shadowmeld (drow ninja racial legacy) effect. Fragile armor that has a chance to break whenever you get DISEMBOWELED or greater. Stuff that makes you hungry faster/slower. There are all sorts of stuff you could do instead of just save vs. spells, dam/hit, +/- stats, and AC.
-A clothing system. Have extra equipment slots for shirts, dresses, pants, robes, and other clothes that do nothing in terms of combat and are hidden if you are also wearing armor (eg you can't see shirts if you're wearing a living wood torso). Because it's kind of weird to think that everyone's either covered in armor or naked.
-Player owned houses. This is one thing that's probably easier to do with AR's small playerbase. Have people be able to put furniture in there, or maybe write the room description. It can serve as an extension of your inventory that you can't enter with adrenaline, and a potential roleplay outlet.
-You said as outlandish as we like, right? Reduce the effect of sanctuary to make it more of a bonus than an absolute necessity in PK. Have purple potions sold in shops, or available in more places. The overwhelming necessity of sanctuary and the subsequently huge amount of attention those two hobgoblins get seems kind of silly to me. I know this raises balance problems between classes that can sanc themselves and those that can't, so you give self-sanc'ers something else instead.
-Bleeding. Have people take bleeding damage on top of regular damage that works kind of like cause continual. And the bleeding damage could be varied depending on whether you were slashed/pierced/bashed/magicked. And maybe a corresponding skill that can stop bleeding but causes lag. Okay, I'm thinking something like this: make a 'blood loss' variable that increases in value whenever you're hit. Every once in a while you take damage and that variable goes down until it's at zero.
-Swimming skill. Instead of not being able to go on water without a boat, make it so that you take major damage and maybe a little lag from drowning every step you take in a water room, and have that damage/lag be reduced by a swimming skill that everybody learns. Except maybe dwarves and duergars.
-Make useless weapons and armor less useless, so that most common weapons and armor are at least comparable. For, make a goblin's short sword have an average of 10 instead of 5, so it can be a little closer to the moss-covered sword of average 15.
-Allow a color option for dodged/parried attacks to be blue like the missed attacks.
-I hate the Shire. All of it. At least just call it something else, get rid of Ganda-- I mean, that stupid elven wizard, and the One Ring.
-Come to think of it, you could do stuff like that for weapons too.
-Slightly increased walking lag the closer to your weight capacity you are? Is that possible to implement without making it game-breaking? It could provide an interesting decision along the lines of "should I carry 30 purple potions around and sacrifice a little running speed, or should I risk just having 4 so that if I use them all up, I can run away a little better?"
-Being able to talk while mortally wounded. So people can spout out dramatic one-liners before they die.
-Make berserkers' wild smash a lot stronger when you're close to death.


...wow. I had a lot of stupid suggestions all pent-up inside of me that I never said because a.) they'd never happen. b.) they're not good ideas, or c.) both a and b. This thread has made me happy.

[_Clifton_]

Brawl days.

[Viggs]

A Bong and Nudity increase next year would be swell!!!

[Krakknot]

I would like to see more areas to explore. Especially areas that you can explore as a 30ish lvl alone. Since im new and ive never gotten a character out of the 30's, this would help me out. Maybe someone else too.

[Erlwith]

*Temple priests being able to "enchant" any non-rare/unique armor or weapon. Enchanting would halve the stats on the object and make it unlootable upon death. This would not work on general "items", like gyvel potions/medic scrolls/sacks, food etc.

*Make assassination less cheese. A ninja should lurk in the shadows and wait for their victim, and there should be a round or two of lag where both players must remain in the same room before the assassination attempt takes place. Not flee/assassinate

*More interesting and complex RP events ran by staff, with a beginning, middle and end that all fit together.

*Less cookie cutter skills. I will suggest some, but I would like to see less skills purely for the mechanics of PK and more skills that work with the RP of a class. Thieves would rock with gag.

[Xerties]

Thirded brawl days

Really the biggest thing that needs to be addressed right now is the playerbase. If I can find a decent job to supplement my income I'd be willing to throw down a few bucks for a banner or something. I can't remember who's idea it was, but I also like the idea of leaving little flyers around the Fantasy section of your local library/bookstore. Maybe a demo with game text in real-time would be good too. I know you can use Fraps to record game stuff, but I don't know if it'll work with zMud.

I'm sure I have more ideas, but I can't think of what they are right now.

[Davairus]

I dont think brawl days are necessary when we have 50's but perhaps the equipment hand-outs help, since that normally tends to get throttled by the most active players and prevents casual people from experiencing close fights at 50 as often. Maybe holiday items that last until end of holiday would replicate the "enjoy it while it lasts" feel. Shrug. Nobody's condying here. BTW expanding the playerbase is your problem not mine, more players is bad news for my mobs.

[pip]

uhh, i fourth the brawl day. i think having more of them would give the people who haven't had a level 50 a general idea of how fun it is. so maybe it would give them incentive to actually rank instead of getting to 40 and deleting or even worst - trashing

then again i guess people aren't really concerned when they can loot a level 50 and pimp their pk range so i would suggest making the badass rares 50 only or atleast 45+

[_Clifton_]

brawl days are ridiculously fun and casual, and it seems like a lot of vet would like it.

[Xerties]

The great thing about brawl days is it gives you a day of 0 consequences chaos. You don't lose anything you've spent a long time accumliating, your rating doesn't get destroyed, you don't lose con, you don't lose the time you've spent leveling/training to condeath. You just get to have a day to blow off steam and have a good time.

[Davairus]

So far I've only seen a few logical reasons for brawl day.

* the great pwipe of 1998. The mud (trashfest at the time) was being vastly rebalanced after months of work, so people were allowed to fuck around for the last time. the mud was closing down and re-opening with roleplay enforced. I saw the need for that, without the wipe nobody would have done it. i.e. a brawl day can accompany a pwipe. i.e. you don't get your old character back in the event of a brawl day

* some kind of disaster e.g. the pfiles get wiped by accident/malicious hacker, and while the imms are trying to recover the files then the mud is just set on brawl. (In that case it could just be wizlocked unless its going to take weeks)

* all the really old imps came back, took over, and just decided the game is utter unplayable shit so they just left it on brawl mode until they fixed. And they probably actually would leave it like that for weeks.

Reasons against:

* the game is a universe world that takes itself seriously. It doesnt make sense for it to just vanish for one day, replaced by a trashfest for one day, and the next day everything is right as rain again. If everything is gone then it should stay gone, and be followed by starting over with new pfiles.

* people get to play level 50's without having worked for them, it isn't supposed to be that way, you are supposed to EARN your level 50 and your right to play there with the best.

* I dont think I ever actually saw anybody use the brawl day to try out classes. They just want to roll things like stone giant invokers, or have a "cabalme" command to steamroll with cabal powers on top. They play their old character with the exact same name, or just a berserker/warrior to hit hardest with the eq. It doesnt serve as a learning experience at all.

* they get quickly dull after about 20 minutes, which is when the OOC gangbanging starts, and people start just using the silver eq to do winter runs. They want it gone and their old character back.

* you DON'T need a brawl day to blow off steam. If you would just drop the anti-pk'ing stance (which exists entirely because of peer pressure) you would be able to have that fun at level 25, 30, w/e

* I could keep going, meh.

Reasons for:

* it would be "cool" / "fun" / awesome

Fatality. Stop wasting your time.

[Vhrael]

* A "Girls of Abandoned Realms" bikini calendar...

Eh, on second thought, forget that one.

[Vanisse]

Here Vhrael, happy belated Strythoween/early Strythmas...

[Krakknot]

OH BABY!!!! can I get that Invokers number?