Posts made by Roccandil

Once a player has built and populated a house in a city, they'll think twice before picking up and moving to another, and the more they invest in a city, the less they'll want to move.

Buying the non-city resources they need will probably be easier than multi-accounting, since the developers have indicated it will be hard for players to maintain one city with all their available time (much less split their time between multiple cities).

At that, I believe players -will- be able to multi-city with multiple toons on the same account: at least one city per planet, so depending on the reliability and expense of portal trade, playing a toon on each planet may be easier, cheaper, and more rewarding than multi-accounting.

@Prometheus

Thanks for the answers! Some more questions:

• Can a city meet upkeep via cultivations?
• More precisely, are you planning to allow a max-level large city the option to meet cereal upkeep by dedicating space to cultivation?
• What about a max-level small city?
• Oh, and I keep forgetting: does a large city get more from its nodes than a small city?
• And while I'm thinking about it, will we get cultivations at the same time as cereal upkeep requirements?
• And river transport/docks, will that ever be a thing? (would be awesome if you could transport more goods via navigable rivers than roads!)

As to the gold upkeep requirement, the gold economy currently feels bizarre, since the source for it is humanoid monsters, and the sinks are entirely abstract (who's actually receiving the gold for an unclaimed wilderness house or city plot? ghosts of the past residents? ).

To be honest, I think a knowledge requirement would make more sense for founding houses/cities. And a barter economy might be cool. (A player-made currency economy might be even cooler! )

Very cool! Some questions:

• Is one resource node the maximum a city can have?
• Some of the nodes appeared to have double names (silver/gold). Does that mean one node can have multiple resource types?
• Is the quantity of resources gatherable from a node infinite? Are there any restrictions at all (say, X total resources gathered per hour)?
• Is there a cap on citizens who can gather from a city's node in parallel?
• Can unclaimed nodes be gathered by anyone?
• Can cereals be harvested any other way than nodes?
• Are the vegetables, meat, and gold required for city upkeep what we gather in the wild?
• Can gold gathered from a gold node be used for upkeep?

Also, it occurs to me that if there's no reliable way other than resource nodes to meet the cereal upkeep requirement, and if there can only be one node connected per city, that will probably push most cities to being cereal producers.

Founding a city that doesn't have a cereal node will be a huge risk, since you can be starved into destruction simply by no one trading with you. All other nodes are "would-be-nices" in comparison, and only bigger guilds will realistically be able to found cities to exploit those nodes.

In short, non-cereal cities will be extensions of cereal cities. That seems imbalanced.

@GamerSeuss said in Aiming system and skills tree are bad , very bad .:

Because Magic Missile always hits with a series of like 5-6 missiles, the manual targeting for it I think is an important limiting factor. In D&D, the game where Magic Missile traditionally comes from, it is also an always hit spell, BUT it is also always limited by the fact you can't target an inanimate object or specific part of the body with it. Granted, most versions of Magic Missile in D&D can hit different targets, but that would be too hard to implement in the style of this specific spell in an isometric free-form game

Magic missile can be saved against, so it's not guaranteed damage.

While I might argue more in depth, the bottom line for me is that combat targeting feels bad, and isn't fun.

@kellewic said in Aiming system and skills tree are bad , very bad .:

@Roccandil Being able to hit a specific target in the middle of a pack feels a bit off to me since that mob would have a lot of cover. Most melee weapons already hit multiple targets and, as you said, there are several AoEs for spells.

The problem is that I can't fire at all. I can shoot a firebolt into the middle of a pack, but not magic missiles, because I'm just as likely to hover over a friendly as an enemy.

Another way to handle it would be allow shooting something like magic missiles at a spot on the ground.

The targeting system is indeed bad. As much as as I can, I avoid skills that require targeting. AoE and non-targeting skills (like firebolt or fireball) are much easier to use.

There needs to be a way to target-lock an enemy, so you can continue to hit it while in the middle of a pack.

@Prometheus said in Patch Log - v.a.2.3.0g - 1st Balancing Patch:

Chilling Touch and Paralyzing Touch are now Toggle spells that can only be used when Unarmed and enchant your basic attacks.

Cool! I like this one!

@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:

You define things by removing everything they arent, not adding all possibility. Then you just get a nebulous blob identical to all the others.

Hmm. I think philosophically I disagree on some level. But, from the Fractured perspective, there are more quantifiable factors:

• Opportunity cost. Even if one toon can potentially be everything, it can't be everything at once. If a toon is being used as the best crafter, it can't simultaneously be gathering or fighting.
• Player enjoyment and skill. Even granted potentially identical toons, players will gravitate to different gameplay that they enjoy, and become uniquely skilled at implementing that gameplay (even if the toons are identical).

In that regard, I think the best way to guarantee uniqueness is not to put obstacles or straightjackets on toons and players, but to provide as many options as possible.

@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:

Ultimately if crafting is something easy for everyone to do it loses meaning because it then just becomes a necessary hassle you level up to become the same as everyone else and then it may as well not even exist.

Based on what I'm seeing now, that's what crafting will be: something everyone can do for themselves, with an optimized alt if needed. The bottlenecks will be resource gathering and enchantment gambling.

Making crafting hard to master, and thus unique to a subset of the population, seems counter to the developers' design principles, which is one reason I suggested tying crafting leveling to the cities.

@maze said in Is Alt-Spamming even a bad thing?:

I have a game called haven and hearth.
Character progression there is progress thought "study objects" what take time to study~ because of that the game is geared to pumping out as many study objects as possible and having as many alts since an alt can only study a few "study objects" at a time.

In general it leaves a real bad taste in my month~ I use about 80-100 alts in that game.
-Alts for watching monster spawns (about 30 alts are used for just this)
-Alts for crafting (tailoring, mining, fighting, farming, butcher, cooking, ect)
-Alts for transporting (about 2 alts are used for this~ since its faster to teleport stuff back to home using an alt)

Just to sort the alts I have to have account for each job (mazefarmer, mazewatcher1, mazewatcher2....)
It's become such a chore but to stay competitive you need to do it...the people resort to botting to keep track of stuff and have bots do small task...then more alts/bots are made....

My point is alts will be used for small to great task regardless. the best you can do is reduce the need for them as much as possible.

rare monsters are camped by alt/bots in a lot of games.
I found the best way to protect rare mobs was place them in areas were people can't log out in. or get kicked out of the area.

Wow, that's an extreme example! And here I thought my 20 or so alts in Wurm Online was overboard.

In the MMOs I've played, I can't say I've ever enjoyed the mechanics that actively promote alt spam.

@GamerSeuss said in Death Penalty of losing all gear and inventory: WORST IDEA EVER!!!:

@Roccandil said in Death Penalty of losing all gear and inventory: WORST IDEA EVER!!!:

Exactly: that's a design principle, not an artifact of Alpha, and I disagree with their approach.

The developers have been clear from the very beginning about their design philosophies. Although they are calling for player feedback on ideas on how to improve the game, they have also said they will NOT BE compromising their design principals to do so. They want to make a game unlike other games, and one of the ways that they will do that, and one of the things they need to be sure of, given how they brought their backers into the fold, is by NEVER compromising their design principles.

Suggest new avenues of exploration, new ways to do things, new approaches to gameplay, BUT in this case, design principles stated from the very beginning are effectively sacred cows, AND THEY SHOULD BE! These are the things that drew most of the backers to this game in the first place. These are the things most of the backers actually fear that the developers will cave to and compromise their vision on.

I'm all for improving this game, I love the whole idea behind it, but I want the end result to still be the game I wanted to back in the first place. Its great that you have ideas that are different than others, but realize where there is room for compromise, and where your changing the game intrinsicly.

Design principles are different than the implementation of those principles.

For example, maybe I've misread the mechanic, but the idea of unchangeable starting attributes appears to be an attempt to keep new players from being impossibly far behind old players.

I agree with that design principle, but not the implementation. It will result in alt spam.

The same is true of decaying gear: I understand the desire to have an economy with fountains and sinks, but I don't believe the current implementation will have the effect the developers want.

I has a solution I like! Implement massively time-consuming crafting leveling, not on player toons, but on NPC crafters bound to a city.

That solves several problems at once:

• Specialization would be easy to implement (I could see leveling the city NPC crafters requiring the combined efforts of all citizens for years and massive amounts of resources), so a city would have to decide what they wanted to focus on: whether a specific kind of crafting/enchanting related to nearby resource nodes, or a generalist approach
• You can't alt-spam cities to easily bypass any restrictions
• A brand-new player who is accepted to an old city can instantly get access to high-level city NPC crafters, so new players aren't disadvantaged by joining the game years late

That also provides the following twists:

• Cities with high-level NPC crafters become even more valuable and attractive, both to new players of the game, and to enemies
• Provides interesting, organic PvE missions to level the city crafters, something even new players could be useful doing
• Specific cities would become known as the best places to get certain gear/items
• Innate trade routes would form between such cities
• The city crafting specialties and resulting world effects would outlast any one player or guild; cities would be more likely to have their own character (instead of being carbon copies)

And I could go on.

@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:

It just physically takes a lot of direct player time commitment to level crafting. To the point that many players dont even do crafting at all. The crafting dedicated players slowly grind their craft. This gives you something to work the game economy off of now. In such a game most people will gather materials, and need to buy from crafters.

Ya, time does work, but it's usually implemented as repetition. I'd rather see it implemented as a goal tree, very like the knowledge system, in which doing many different things related to the craft progresses the toon, but it's impossible to become the best by doing just one thing over and over.

That seems, however, to contradict the goal of the developers, in allowing new players to be nearly as powerful as old players right off the bat.

In that case, the only way I can see to limit toons (or the effectiveness of alts) is by limiting resource distribution. Sure, you can theoretically craft everything, but it will be impossible to get the resources in your area to craft everything.

So, someone -has- to transport goods: either you go and gather/buy them, or someone comes to you and sells them. And in that case, it may be much more convenient to buy finished goods from a traveling merchant.

As pointed out already, limiting what players can do on a single toon will simply result in players making other toons (I think I'm going to get eight or nine toons on one account alone, and I could easily make other accounts).

That's also a problem with the attribute system, and one reason I think it's an ineffective approach. Instead of trying to arbitrarily enforce player limitations, thus resulting in toon spam, I'd embrace players doing everything they can on one toon, and look for ways to reward specialization.

The geographic distribution of resources in the game, for instance, may promote specialization.

@GamerSeuss said in Death Penalty of losing all gear and inventory: WORST IDEA EVER!!!:

You can only enchant to tier 2 at best right now anyway.

And even that's a pain far greater than the benefit.

@GamerSeuss said in Death Penalty of losing all gear and inventory: WORST IDEA EVER!!!:

don't expect things to be WORTH IT at all.

Some things, though, are already highly worth it to me.

@GamerSeuss said in Death Penalty of losing all gear and inventory: WORST IDEA EVER!!!:

They have also stated that they intended from the very beginning that your gear should degrade and need to be replaced constantly, to encourage the merchant-effect again, and to keep characters from maxing out skills and talents and then finding their optimum gear build and then resting on their laurels. THEY WANT IT TO BREAK DOWN!

Exactly: that's a design principle, not an artifact of Alpha, and I disagree with their approach.

Here's one way of looking at it: two naked mages can do far more together than one mage in the best gear with the best enchants, and they risk far less.

And the best enchanted gear right now is a pain to get/make, much less anything beyond it. I don't expect higher-tier enchants or gear to get any easier to make.

All the developer's approach really does is promote repetition, which is a substitute for good, diverse gameplay. In my case, that approach won't stimulate the economy; it will suppress it, because it simply won't be worth it to me to participate.

I'll just make whatever gear I can mass-produce, and not bother with anything better.

@MaxFlex said in Death Penalty of losing all gear and inventory: WORST IDEA EVER!!!:

@Roccandil it is worth the cost if you just don't die

Your gear wears out and breaks even if you don't die. Gear/enchants aren't worth it to me right now.

@Razvan said in General feedback:

The problem with Fractured is that there will be little PvP in Arboreus. My solution would be: items should be repairable, but unlike other planets, on Arboreus they'll also lose max durability (which can't be restored). Regardless, going through 3 spears in a night of farming is not reasonable.

True enough. I'm hoping Fractured will have better PvE than the other worlds, though, and perhaps trashing gear for death in PvE on Arboreus would be good, if only in hardcore PvE areas.

@GamerSeuss said in General feedback:

Equipment degrading to the point it needs to be replaced is an intentional feature of this game, not merely a limitation. This is to encourage the merchant economy as all equipment is player-crafted/enchanted in game.

At least in my case, degradation doesn't encourage any kind of economy, but rather not using enchantments or gear at all. I'm just not excited by gear.

For economic stimulation, Albion's system of trashing gear when killed in PvP is a good one, perhaps the best I've seen. The dying player generally doesn't care that their gear trashed (they'd want it all to trash, if possible), while the killing player is happy to get any loot.

@GamerSeuss said in General feedback:

Bigger plots are current reserved for outside of City plots only, as really right now the only compensation for building outside.

That's arbitrary! I see no reason to limit the size of a house plot that I, as governor, can place in a city.

The primary point of a wilderness plot to me is tax avoidance.

Couple more Gripes:

• I really don't enjoy the aggro range on many mobs, especially when they come from off-screen.
• I wish status effects displayed over my skill bar, instead of the upper left. Many times it feels like the game breaks, only I discover that it's a status effect I couldn't see go off because I'm paying attention to the combat. The effects that show up over my toon's head are nice, though.