Best posts made by KairosVal

The A compilation of everything we know about Fractured thread links through to this:

@prometheus said in The knowledge system and cookie cutter builds.:

@Kris you'll likely get a few free stat respecs too, yes, but it's hard to tell right now exactly how many and when.

From memory (can't find the quote) I think it's been discussed that the devs don't want your attribute pick on character creation to be completely set in stone, to allow for a situation where a player learns more about how the game works and comes to regret their initial pick. The idea is to not force that player to throw their character away and have to start over to get a different attribute distribution.

However, the overall point of attribute distributions is that they're supposed to be permanent to make your character your character. The attribute distribution should be a decision that has consequences - because in the absence of consequences, the decision is kind of meaningless.

One of the reasons that I found Diablo III to be so boring was that it was way too easy to swap around a character build. In Diablo II my character was my character, and the decisions I made during progression had long term consequences. In Diablo III I could just exit combat, click a few buttons, swap out some gear, and presto-chango I had an entirely different character build. So my character was completely indistinguishable from the same character type played by any other player, so I wasn't invested in the character, so I wasn't invested in the game, and I'd get bored somewhere around Act III and stop playing.

So I like the idea that race, attributes and background will permanent* and impactful. If it's too easy to swap them out then the decisions aren't meaningful.

If anything I'd like the campfire system to be more restrictive than is currently planned... But I can acknowledge that I'm probably on the extreme end of the playerbase in terms of preferring permanence in all aspects of character progression, so I don't expect the devs to change their designs out just for little old me.

@darian

@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:

@logain Not necessarily. How about unique relics that are truly unique (only 1/server)

AFAIK the current plan is that there will only be one server.

Slightly off topic: I like group based gameplay. But I'm time-poor and most of my mates don't play MMOs. So it's hard to find and maintain a group. So I wind up solo-ing quite a lot.

One of the things I liked about GW2 was how world events would lead to spontaneous groups.

@severinus said in Will there be a way to change your Attributes?:

I remember playing the same MUD - wasn't it discworld? - and thinking very specifically ahead, which path to go and decisions to make.

Yes! It was!

I could remember the mechanic, but not which MUD it was from.

Wow. That takes me back. Haven't played MUDs since I was in my early teens. Over half a lifetime ago.

Really liked their multiple-node tree-based skill distribution model too.

@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:

@kairosval true, but does it really have to be balanced? Since i'm referring to massive economy effort in order to use the super relics, it would not be a common sight. Consider it the epic final battle in a single player game. But you just might loose and live with the consequences. It would also force factions to prepare for possible threats and develop strategies fit to deal with the specific situation, rather than jut have a standard siege/defense strategy employed over and over again.

As I see it, we wind up with essentially two different scenarios.

1. The effort required to generate these items is high, but once a single guild has one, everyone else has to have one too. So everyone straps in for a collective arms race. Obsessive completionist gamer culture kicks in. Within a year, these items start to become common simply by virtue of how many gamers are willing to essentially work 80 hours per week for free to find optimum grinding pathways to unlock the top-tier content. Because gamers be gamers.

2. The effort required to generate these items is so high that not even the completionist-gamer mindset is enough to generate them in a reasonable amount of time... Which means any development effort applied to this task will not get to be experienced by the vast majority of the playerbase. That's not the best investment of developer time no matter how you look at it.

Then we need to decide if the legendary items decay or not.

• If they do not decay, that will eventually make player crafting obsolete as eventually all top-tier players will aim for and acquire legendary gear, at which point they will stop having to buy more gear.

• If they do decay, that may keep player crafting relevant. But it will feel bad to the players and guilds that possess the weapon to have so much of their effort waste away.

No matter what way you cut it, this idea of extra-mega-legendary-super-saiyan-doomsday equipment just doesn't cut it for me. It makes sense why a gamer would want to have such an item, but I see it kind of sucking for everyone else. I just don't see that it would be a good use of developer time when you consider it from a impact-to-gamers-per-developer-hour perspective.

I think it would be better to have the best items just come from the top-tier crafting characters building items from the the rarest raw materials gathered from all three worlds. And preferably in a situation where no single crafter will be able to master EVERY aspect of crafting, so that more than one crafter will be needed to build all the intermediary components at the highest level - creating a market for high-quality intermediary components.

I think this would be better in the long run from a game economy perspective because it doesn't require anything additional on top of the already planned player-driven crafting economy. If things need to be rebalanced, the devs can tweak spawn/drop rates on raw materials, the number of materials needed for each component, the decay rate of the items, or as a last resort the stats of the items in question. The items created follow the same decay and drop-on-death rules as all other items, so it feels fair to everyone even if not everyone is happy with it.

I understand the thirst for the power-fantasy of being the player or the guild that owns the god-item and can smash everyone else in the face... But given Fractured's design-goal of players being competitively relevant from day one, I don't think that the god-item concept is a good fit, as it represents a level of end-game progression that would break that design goal. I see too many problems, and I don't think the payoff is worth the design and development effort that would be required to identify and address those problems.

Just my 2c though.

I suspect I don't take the show seriously enough to qualify as a Whovian, but I do enjoy the shows.

Really looking forward to Whittaker's take on the doctor. I've been wanting to see a lady Doctor since I found out that cross-gender regeneration was possible in the case of the Corsair.

@target said in Payment Model info and post release strategy:

I'm against any payment model that includes the ability to open your wallet for in game wealth. Fractured already has a box price, a cash shop, and a vip subscription. If it needs to further supplement its business model, a non-p2w option is a cosmetic version of Warframe's prime access or Path of Exile's supporter packs.

One thing that this can be a good idea for is that it can help to anchor an in-game currency to a real-world currency, and that can be

in the box for combating mudflation.

I think it's probably best solved by balancing the penalties for being there.

A demon in Arboreus will receive significant penalties while there - even more than when visiting Syndesia when there's no eclipse. We'll be significantly weaker.

If there's too much ganking going on, the devs can balance that with harsher penalties. Harsher penalties on all individuals, or maybe increase the penalties on each individual demon based on the number of demons nearby to to make zerging inefficient.

I plan to play a demon character, and my expectation is that I'll hang out on Tartaros to build up my resources and join up with a guild, then once I can afford to lose a set of gear we can go raiding in Syndesia on a regular basis. Then once I start getting good at that and I want the next level of challenge, I'll be up for a suicidal raid on Arboreus.

But I fully expect to die in Arboreus >90% of the time I go there. The penalties should be steep because I grok the need for a mostly safe PvE setting... And also, that's what makes it a challenge in the first place.

If the devs do change it around so that demons can't do PvP on Arboreus at all to make it fully safe, then I do feel like that would take something valuable away in terms of the lore and the setting. I think the distinction between mostly splitting the playerbase and fully splitting the playerbase is a meaningful one with negatives on both sides that go beyond the interests of just carebears and PvPers.

I used to play as a carebear miner in EVE Online, but even there the potential to get ganked in highsec meant that I had to stay alert and actually pay attention, and that made things more interesting. I think that mostly-carebear-with-some-spice is a good thing, and that if you give carebears the ability to opt out of the spice altogether then enough will do that such that opting for the spice becomes a disadvantage and no-one will pick it.

But even if the devs went with a full split, I'd live with it. There'll still be lots of hairless monkeys to hunt in Syndesia. I'd still disagree, but its no biggie.

Stumbled onto a Spotify playlist called 'Your Favorite Coffeehouse'. Super chill background music. Not really listening to it, just a nice backdrop to have on shuffle while I do other things.

@jetah said in Payment Model info and post release strategy:

depends if they allow a dagger to be changed into a 2h sword. If it's same weapon type then it won't matter as the gear is insignificant to power.

The example I have in mind is a mage that uses ice magic reskinning their mage robes to look like massive fire-covered full plate with a over-designed glowing orange halo and flame-based particle effects as they move, that kind of thing.

I get it because that looks cool and everything. But it's confusing, and has the consequence that you can't infer anything about a character from their appearance.

Good game design should use the appearance of a character to communicate something meaningful about that character in gameplay terms. The sword that does fire damage can have a fire particle effect, the mace that does electrical damage can have an electrical effect, if they're in full plate they're probably a tanky warrior, if they're in light armor they're probably an agile DPS, if they're in robes and cloth they're probably a mage, that kind of thing. Cosmetics can spoil the ability to communicate that information quickly and cleanly.

Like where Kralith said about looking up the hero's data in PoE? I get that that's a thing, but it shouldn't be neccesary. But the amount of over-designed cosmetic items in PoE makes that a requirement. If you have to look up raw data on a character sheet to get a basic feel for what kind of equipment a character is currently using, to me that feels like an art design failure.

In games with loot progression it also makes the visual progression of the design of gear meaningless too, but given Fractured's horizontal progression model that's probably less of a concern here.

But like I said: This is a minor quibble, and the lesser of all evils. So I'm not throwing my toys out of the cot about it or anything like that.

It'd be nice if there was a way to preserve the informational content of well designed art assets while still allowing for cosmetic customization. But I think that the conflict there is very real and those servers aren't going to pay for themselves.

Any thoughts around demon summoning?

For example, an evil human can cast a summoning spell that will teleport in a PC demon. A demon can be mentioned by name, or can be left unnamed and mentioned only by race. The PC can opt in or out. Unnamed will jump around online demon players until someone decides to opt in.

The demon comes in and can fight for or trade with the summoner. If the demon does something illegal while under the 'control' of the human, the human carries all the legal penalties for the action as per normal Sundesian law.

The demon can opt to teleport back to Tartaros whenever they feel like it.

The human has a banish ability to try and force the demon back to Tartaros whenever the human likes it, but the demon has a chance to resist banishment based on stats and abilities.

The summoning ability has a duration, at the end of which the banish effect will automatically trigger. The human has the option to trigger the banish effect early if desired.

So long as the human doesn't banish the demon and the demon stays within proximity of the summoner, the demon gets to remain in Syndesia without the normal penalties. But once banishment happens the summoning effect ends, and if the demon resists then they begin to suffer the normal penalties.

I plan to main a hellfire demon, and a mechanic like this would be really neat. Probably not something that I'd expect to be ready on launch, but something I'd like to see eventually given how many of the pieces of the puzzle are already in play.

Single shard baby!

But for the record, they're building on a platform called SpatialOS. It's a fully scalable system where worker processes can be added and removed on the fly in the cloud. So while Fractured is a single shard in the sense that everyone shares the same game world (worlds?), it doesn't map perfectly on the traditional notion of a "single server".

You can find a lot of neat information here.

@darian said in Idea: Ability that allows evil summoners to summon PC demons.:

@kairosval Marvelous little gimmick... have it difficult to achieve... aka getting massive Favor with Babilis, and perhaps completing a really difficult challenge for him would reward you with the ability to summon the 1 daemon but you would need to pay a heavy price... I think gold, other vanity/ or perhaps sacrifice the hearts of defeated PCs. This way you can't really abuse the ability and you're also most certainly evil aligned and considered a criminal throughout Syndesia. Also, the summoning ritual should also involve negotiating with the daemon, Meaning that you can't just summon him on the fly, in the middle of combat. I'd also add a 50% dedicated manna cost for keeping the planar link that allows the Daemon to stay on Syndesia, meaning that while he benefits from the support of another player, the summoner only has half a manna pool for his own spell casting.

Yeah, all of this stuff.

This would be really fun.

Maybe have something on the demon's side to, so you qualify for being summoned. Then the demon can activate or deactivate it as and when they want to use it. Kind of like a 'looking for group' flag, but with in-game mechanics.

Another thing that might be good would be the option to bring in an AI demon if there's no PC demons available.

@target said in Payment Model info and post release strategy:

I don't know enough about Eve to decide whether it's pay to win or not, so I googled it and find conflicting info, with most of the people defending it making up the same uneven scenarios that you just did. It's not very convincing.

Eve has this weird auto-balance mechanic. A lot of PvP is based around killboard entries online showing the total value of the ships you've destroyed vs. the ships you have lost. So flying around in something really expensive is like having a massive bullseye on your back.

So it's sort of pay-to-win, but at the same time you're increasing the amount of risk, so there's still a meaningful risk/reward tradeoff... But it also perversely winds up creating high-value content for other players to destroy. So it has this weird way of balancing out.

That's why the accounts you will have read will be conflicting - because it is kind of a conflicted situation. It just sort of works out in the end, because that's just Eve.

The reason it works (if it can be said to work at all) is because of the weird dynamics in now the online killboards - which are not a part of the core game - motivate in-game PvP behavior. It sort of happened by accident and not as part of the core game design. So I wouldn't bank on the same thing applying anywhere outside of Eve unless it was very carefully put together.

@Tuoni said in All-Backers Access & Apr 12 Cities Q&A:

Yeah a video would be nice. I did not have a chance to watch it live.

It was early in the AM for me. I'm hyped for the game but I'm also 35 and need my sleep to not be a grumpy asshole the next day.

Kairos sits back, cracks a beer, and leaves it to @Logan to field this one.

@fibs said in Consumable Currency:

Path of Exile has extreme inflation, what are you talking about?

Look closely: I never said PoE doesn't have inflation.

PoE is a grind-based looter. Of course they have extreme inflation. The kind of money sink that would be required to prevent inflation in a grind-based looter would be so punitive as to break the game for anyone who isn't already fantastically wealthy.

The mechanic of getting players to destroy their currency won't make a dent in inflation if massive amounts of currency and gear are continually being created. That doesn't mean the mechanic is ineffective as a money-sink: It just means that any efficacy of such a system insufficient to the task of reigning in inflation on a grind-based looter - but that's an unreasonable standard to begin with.

But for a player-driven economy in a game that isn't a grind-based looter, I think that system might have even more utility as a money sink than it would in a game like PoE. Inflation is still inevitable, but that doesn't mean that inventive money sinks can't be used to put a drag on that inflation.

The trick in my view would be in adapting it to Fractured. Not sure if that would be achievable either in principle or in practice, because the two games have very different designs, and I have no idea how hard it would be to implement.

But if you used health potions, mana potions, speed potions, fragments of scrolls to create skill tomes, and so on as currency, then there's a drive for players to consume them and remove currency from the game. I think that's more interesting than just having an NPC shop that sells these items for copper/silver/gold - particularly in a player-driven economy where you'd expect players to craft and sell those items wherever possible.