Posts made by Roccandil

Yep, I saw this too.

I haven't seen a Treant yet, but somehow it's listed in my bestiary under NULL, and its knowledge progress seems to be tracking my knowledge of wolves.

I tried creating a temporary toon and setting resolution size and fullscreen inside game, and then relaunching. That did make the launcher fullscreen, but the attributes are still truncated, and I can't lower any, so I'm stuck with defaults.

Yep, I'm having this issue as well. (Practically, it means I can't set attributes.)

In one of the Alpha tests, they added a lot of INT onto gear, which meant you could get 27, I think. At that point, you could pretty much solo any mob on the map using the icicle shotgun and mage armor. It felt strong, and was fun to play.

The last tests removed the extra INT (as far as I could see), so you were back to max 18 INT, which is extremely wimpy (and for me, not fun to play right now). Apparently 25 will be max, and it will be hard to get, but it does look like it will be worth it.

As someone else pointed out, however, the available spells don't feel balanced yet. Your bread and butter spells (like magic missile) have significant cooldowns, and the big spells (like fireball) are anemic at best, especially against the toughest mobs.

As to secondary attributes, I enjoyed playing with CON, STR, and PER at 18 (as well as INT 18 + the bonuses from gear), and DEX and CHA at minimum. CON and STR get you inherent resistances and armor that stack nicely with mage armor and improve the Frenzy move buff, and PER gets you a lot of saves (not sure if accuracy helps spells, but the crit bonuses probably do).

CHA and DEX do get you more max energy, but not regen, and regen seems to count for more.

I hate item decay, that is, durability loss over time (not use). That turns the game into a repetitive chore.

Item durability going down on use is a different matter, but even then, it's annoying.

What -really helps the economy is something like Albion's item-trashing system, where on PvP death a significant portion of gear is simply removed from the game. I really like that, for two reasons:

• The dying player has lost everything anyhow, and won't really care if some gear was trashed (would probably prefer it!);
• The looting player gets some gear (plus the kill), and so still gets a reward (sometimes a very good reward).

That method "hides" an item sink in plain sight, and is not a frustrating, repetitive burden.

@Znirf said in Min/Max'ing and crafting/fighting:

Six branches, in each of these there are only two knots that give you the attribute bonuses!

How many branches can you complete on one toon?

@Znirf

Thanks! Couple more things:

• By attribute cap, I meant total (natural + talents + armor + consumable). I remember 25 being mentioned, but that wasn't in Alpha.
• How many talent branches can you complete?

The VIP/developers forum might be a great place for us to collaborate with the developers on designing relics and the other things in the Creator+ packs. That seems appropriately exclusive.

Right now, these are my big min-max questions based on Alpha:

• Will there be attribute caps? (25?)
• If so, can I reliably expect to boost an attribute from 20 to the cap with gear? (in Alpha you could get 5+ INT from gear)
• How do the permanent +2 attribute increases work from knowledge (can I get them for each attribute, or do I choose one attribute to boost, and that's it?)

The practical consideration is that there are nice bonuses for getting an attribute to natural 20, so depending on the answers to the above questions, it may be worthwhile to not push any attribute past natural 20, in favor of getting multiple attributes to 20.

For me at least, exploring the interaction of game mechanics is still exploring. Also, I like it when games provide ways to learn within the game what's actually happening (as opposed to looking it up on a third-party website, which to me hurts immersion).

Plots are pre-designated on the map. You can claim one, and then build it up.

Was hoping I could use the palace on one planet, the villa on another, and so on...

Awesome!

@Gothix said in [Poll] City Reputation System:

Each player could have reputation tied to any particular city, better reputation with particular city, he would have some discount at NPCs, and some extra options becoming available to him at certain reputation thresholds.

There could be several ways to increase (and decrease) base reputation with specific city. Base Reputation would then get additionally increased or decreased by temporary factors like... is player member of guild that's currently ruling the city, what is players karma, is player currently citizen of that city, and so on.

Players would have different base reputation tied to each different city.

Does this idea sound appealing or not?

If cities were NPCs, this would make sense to me, but cities will be humans. As a governor, everyone who interacts with my town will have a reputation with -me-.

What I'll want is not a reputation system, but tools to deal with individuals, such as a "kill player X on sight" order to guards (which is something Wurm Online had), or, give player Y a discount in my shops, and player Z access to my crafting stations.

Would also be nice if I could set rules based simply on karma.

When I played World of Tanks a couple years ago, it had exactly what I see you all arguing for:

• No alliances
• Friendly fire
• Collisions
• Restricted guild sizes (100)
• Equal-sized forces
• The clan wars maps would reset periodically, to give everyone an equal chance of getting on the map

Was it the nirvana you describe? Nope. All the best players flocked to a few guilds (clans), who then dominated the best territories, divided it up, stopped fighting each other, and only defended themselves from the lesser guilds who tried to attack.

New guilds/players had very little opportunity to play with top-tier players in a clan setting and thus learn how to improve. I was once able to arrange getting one of the professional e-sports players to shotcall a battle for my clan, and the difference was stark, but it was something that simply didn't happen much.

Limited battle sizes meant it was impossible to include everyone in my clan who wanted to fight in clan wars, and I continually had to put eager people on the bench, which caused all kinds of drama.

Now I'm seeing you all argue for something I already know from experience doesn't work.

I don't think you all can truly understand how awesome the zerg meta is for me in Albion, having first experienced World of Tanks! Zergs include everyone, and the lack of alliance limits (and the disabling of friendly fire) mean that the best alliances still want new people, giving those new people a chance to play with very good players and thus learn.

I very much want to see that in Fractured.

@Bardikens said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

I think alliances in Fractured should be a prominent, but difficult to maintain force. There should be alliances, and they should have some representation in the UI. However, I think that it must stop in the UI. Other than perhaps noting who is in your alliance as you see them, there really shouldn’t be any in game benefit to having an alliance member standing right next to you.

If there's no in-game functionality to alliances, I see no reason to have a pretty alliance UI that does nothing. I want in-game alliances to matter, and I agree with Albion's approach of not allowing allies to attack each other.

Having said that, I agree that the flat nature of Albion alliances (one leader, many members) is less than ideal (although clearly simpler to code and support). I'd rather see alliances be made individually, guild-to-guild.

That provides the following possible scenario which can't exist in Albion:

• Guilds A and B are allied
• Guilds B and C are allied
• Guilds A and C are not allied
• Guilds A and C are at war
• Tension develops between guilds A and B

That would tend to increase the pressure on the human factors of alliances, making sustaining a huge alliance that much more difficult (not to mention the extra paperwork of adding a new ally to every guild already in the alliance! ).

That would also be more true to life, rather like the Byzantine web of alliances that existed before WWI.

One more thing: I could see Tartaros being as you say, with no real alliances at all. That fits its free-for-all nature. I think forcing that on Syndesia, however, would be a grave error.

A few more things:

• This is a massive multiplayer online game. Zergs are a consequence of the massive nature of such a game. If you don't like zergs, why are you playing an MMO?
• Human factors are an effective limit to alliance sizes: personalities, drama, reward distributions, misunderstandings, and the panoply of human entropy weaken alliances the larger they get. Holding a huge alliance together requires a great deal of effort, all game mechanics aside.
• In the unlikely event that everyone decides to make one game-spanning alliance, the players will effectively be saying they don't like PvP, and they just want to play PvE. Instead, then, of trying to force something unwanted on customers via artificial limitations, I'd ask myself what is it about my PvP implementation that the customers dislike so much?

@Gothix said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

Hmm. I don't think friendly fire would reduce zerging (see below), nor is that my goal.

Your goal is not to reduce zerging? Well... i guess that explains a lot... lol

Personally i prefer where skills determine the outcome of the battles and not who brings 1000 players vs 150.

Bringing 1000 players requires more skill than bringing 150. Logistics, coordination, communication are all vital, and make managing 1000 players much harder.

@Jairone said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:

@Roccandil I disagree with the dominant group thing. Most games not only have them with numerical advantages (which is easy to see, and historically accurate, but makes for a terrible balance in games like this) but offer increased rewards for the results often further skewing the next results.

Put on a level field, things often change. Where some of the players might indeed be very good, the same is likely true of those who they were dominating with those advantages. In fact, those who were being dominated are likely as good or better on average, because they have faced hardships forcing them to attempt to improve.

That all is an aside to the entire debate on zergs otherwise, though. Creating good systems that don't punish players within games due to such advantages is a tough thing. At least for games with less vertical power curve we have more limited imbalances to address.

Unlimited alliance size is already a level playing field. The truth is that equal opportunity almost never ends in equal outcome. In order to guarantee equal outcome, you must punish the best players.

If the rules are equally applied to all players, the best players will dominate. If you restrict alliance/guild sizes, the best players will concentrate, to the exclusion of other players (see World of Tanks).

And if you think that somehow helps newer players learn, well, see World of Tanks. To aid learning, it's far better to spread out the best players through a population, instead of keeping them all together.

@Alexian said in The Shadow Empire:

The empire’s leadership is experienced, their ambitions significant, and their vision absolute.

Now that sounds like something said in LoTR.