Posts made by TheRippyOne

@jetah because I need 50 minna bird feathers, My skills are 90% ground-based attacks, so I have trouble killing the flighty jerks, and, besides, I need to go mine for the other ingredients for this Quetzal armor, and I don't want to waste time shouting "I need someone to kill a lot of Boids! anyone want to do this?!" for 5 hours and being entirely ignored. So I'm willing to pay some rando to go do this thing for me, okay?!

XD

Or maybe the town needs 500 Wolf pelts to upgrade a curtain wall, and no one wants to hunt all 500, so you set up a quest, put in the total reward in escrow, and anyone who wants to off-load a pelt can through the interface and get the reward without having to drag the mayor/merchant/town rep out to pay for it, assuming they are even online atm.

Or you're a merchant character, and you need some bodyguards because the eclipse is coming, and you've got a warehouse on Syn, and losing all your goods to a demon raid cause you were in the wrong place at the wrong time sucks.

Or your guild is going to siege a town, and you need to keep the allied town busy, so you quest up a merc raid to hold the second town at bay while you go murder hobo the first.

And, most pressingly, there aren't many NPCs (at least, not until a town attracts them), so being able to hand each other quests fills a need and acts as a general lubricant for the economic engine.

@jetah But the only way to do that, 100% guaranteed, is not to let any players post anything permanent at all, which is...not really an option, if you want to do quest boards. And it get's worse when you consider a standard quest is "Go kill a wolf and bring me their heart. You'll find them southwest of here, after 10 minutes of walking. You'll receive 1,000 gold pieces, pm me when you are done" all good, right? Well, then, some one posts "Go kill [TheRippyOne, to spit ball an example] and bring me their heart. You'll find them at [my actual address, irl]. You'll receive money, contact me when it is done."

Besides the fact that I just got dox'd as part of a death threat, yay, algorithmicly speaking, it is very hard for a computer to say the first one is good, and the second one is not. They are formatted in the same way and use similar language - so even if you did a form sheet, this one still gets through. A human would, quite properly, say "holy crap this is bad" - but that's because we've learned that that's bad through experience, and most companies can't afford to buy a cloned Watson ai to learn and figure out which is which.

I also cast my vote for "stay true to your vision," but also "avoid feature creep" - while it is good to have features, and it is very good to plan for features, make sure your core engine and game experience are there first, and that your features do not get in the way of that experience. Being able to ride a horse is cool, but if you and your horse fall through the map, that's no good XD (as an example).

I think, if you really want a good "not what to do" - read up on the original launch of FFIV, and how they fixed it. While it is a much different game, how it was broken is a good case study for any mmo - the lack of cohesion, the scattershot focus, the non-integrated systems, failed implementations and buggy mess of a playing experience.

@gothix There is another problem - boards that offer hate speech and/or adult/sexual/illegal offers. just because you can't gold farm too well, maybe, possibly, we'll see, doesn't mean people won't drag other things into the game world in various uncomfortable ways - and the devs will need to figure what, if anything, they want to do about it. (I'm not saying they should, or they should not, I'm just saying that it's a thing they will need to make policy about, and decide, if they want to police it, how they are going to go about it)

now that the store is up XD
I advertised at a discord channel I'm on, 100+ people, fairly active game section, and they encourage this sort of thing XD

GET THE ADVERTISEMENT BOMBARDS!

@jetah right, but just because there are seeds, doesn't mean the seeds are ready to reproduce - take them out to early, and there may not be enough nutrients in the seed to sustain the newly sprouted plant, or the seed coat isn't ready, so the seed is unprotected and dies in the elements before it's buried. you take a cucumber from the market, plant the seeds from it - 99% of the time, nothing will grow, even though there are a tonne of seeds in a cucumber, normally. sure, part of that is the hostile and adverse conditions that a farmer puts on the fruit, and continued by the grocer, but

I will once again note, "sudden supernatural bs all over the place" - maybe it takes longer for a plant to develop seeds in a hostile environment, one saturated with this weird magic stuff?

Like, exposing a seed to Arboreus' aether means it grows explosively, and ends up dying unless its stored enough material to survive the unnatural growth? and maybe plants on Tartaros need extra protection from the ravening effects of the hellscape? Syn's theoretical plant issues are harder to come up with, but a decent writer can bs an acceptable answer without too much trouble XD

(ps - I vaguely doubt that this will actually happen - remember, the devs don't like rng in terms of drops, and this "maybe you'll get a seed, maybe you won't" is pretty much that. Still, a proper algorithm on something of this nature is a way to fight some of the effects of deflation on player controlled resources)

@codetsilon well, it's not all that much. figure 6 types of dishes - chicken, pork, beef, fish, vegetables, grain (breads and the like), 8 herbs, and 6 spices. Even if you don't remember exactly what some combination does, you'd be able to guess just from knowing the basics. XD

@alcriblp well, I've played Eternal Darkness, so, yeah, if you want drugs in a video game, expect some truly trippy things to happen XD I wouldn't mind that, actually. OD on something and the game acts like it's formatting your hard drive, or "turns off" your monitor, or disconnected your keyboard as critters close in XD all sorts of nasty mind screw stuff cause you tripped to hard on shrooms XD

@jetah the "logic" would be that not all harvested plants would be "in season" and thus wouldn't produce viable seeds. Given that the world has just seen an apocalypse, of a sort, and unleashed all kinds of supernatural bs across three planets and countless asteroids, this isn't entirely unreasonable.

but really, it would (hopefully) be a carefully tailored algorithm to support a stable state of availability and economic effects while promoting mastery through probabilistic internal means.

@jetah just be sure to not eat the herbs when you devour the corpses of your enemies XD might be tastier, but you want to use them when you need them XD

To address what goes where - I'd put Chili Peppers in Tartaros, and salt. Bitter and harsh by themselves, but in high demand everywhere for their benefits.

Black Pepper in Synesia makes sense...not as hot as Tartaros, and ubiquitous. Cumin, as well?

Arboreus can take cinnamon, and nutmeg - both organic and tree "based"

In general, I like this idea

I'mma git my cook on!

but there is an issue of "what does it do!?"

I would love to see...call it 8 herbs? and 6 spices? and how you use them in combination, and what foods you put them on, produces different effects. so, there is a certain level of mastery involved in cooking for effect. Like, food has a natural secondary nature that only appears when you season it.

as an example, if you add Rosemary to chicken by itself, you get chicken's normal effect, and chicken's hidden nature applies to the herb's effect (defense, let's say). If Rosemary affects ice/water, putting it on defensive chicken get's you a +1 to defense against ice/water damage for...5 minutes? - but if eaten with Rosemary and chili flakes (which gives speed), it gives you a +5% movement bonus for 5 minutes whenever you are hit by an ice/water effect any time you are hit with it for the next hour.

which looks confusing, but can be simplified in certain respects - chicken mostly does defensive stuff, Rosemary affects water damage, and chili flakes affect speed. eat just chicken with Chili flakes? +5% move when your hp is at less than half it's total, for 30 minutes.

If salad does status effects, rosemary salad gives immunity to being Frozen. Chili Flake+Rosemary Salad actually doubles your speed when Frozen - useful if you are in snowy areas, assuming you can stand the other problems that come from being Frozen.

Thyme affects martial skills, horse radish does fire, etc.
Cinnamon is a multiplier for the herb, salt doubles the base food effect, but makes it an effect over time - so eating becomes "regen," instead of "healing," for example - black pepper makes your "reflective" - chicken+Rosemary+pepper means you reflect 5% of all Ice damage back to the attacker, or Beef (attack)+horse radish+pepper gives you a damage boost equal to 5% of all the fire damage you've taken.

and so on

now, clearly, that's a lot of work, and a lot of balance testing to be done, but it's what I'd love to see.

Some obvious limits - effects that share an ingredient overwrite each other - so you can't eat chicken+rosemary and chicken+horse radish to gain 2 elemental defenses, and you can't eat chicken+rosemary and salad+rosemary to protect against both damage and status effects from cold - you have to pick. You can add only 1 spice, and 1 herb, into each dish.

We've gotten a bit far afield - let's agree that pets picking up loot is complicated, as an issue, and in the context of this game in particular, and move on.

Given that we will have at least 2 spell schools that will generate "pets" - undead from necromancy, and constructs from restoration - (and possibly a "charm" somewhere else in psychic or illusion or bard) and there is a possibility for a non-magical skill set that can get you one (the Animal Taming stretch goal), what is the opinion on attack pets?

ie - since there are a few ways to have a 1-vs-1 duel turn into a 1-vs-3, and the devs are going to have to figure out some balance for it any ways, is it an okay thing to have pets that can fight - maybe not well, or efficiently, but still "doing things" in a fight that are "useful" - whether that's as a very poor heal bot, or a ranged sniper for minimal damage, or a minor annoyance of a cc hinderer - do we want pets that are active "fighters" on...well, half-par, let's say...with a basic zombie

Other: Modified natural occurring 1 v 1 - ie, both sides have to accept the pvp in some fashion before the fight is really "on"

(I like Fallout's model - you offer pvp by attacking someone (for micro damage), and they accept by attacking back (for micro damage) and then the fight begins. if the other side ain't interested, you can try to get the kill with micro damage, but it's a) unlikely, b) seriously unrewarding (even if you kill them, you get no loot or money, a miniscule amount of experience, and you get slapped with the killer tag, which makes you appear on everyone's radar, and auto-accepts all pvp attempts with everyone that offers, for...3 days, I think? aka, anyone can "start" a duel with you by pot-shotting you for full damage. conversely, they encourage pvp by making it an exceptional way to gain experience, loot, and resources, if both sides accept - more experience than a similarly leveled critter, significantly more loot and money than is possible for any monster to drop. It's basically the best thing ever, if everyone wants to play, but it discourages some of the more bullying tactics that you can see in some games)

I also enjoy arranged huge messes - 100+ characters just going all out all over the place, either teamed or battle royale - something I'm looking forward to in the eclipse raids and sieges)

@genobee yup. if you compartmentalize and static define "tiles" with "reactions" then the expense of calculation and transmission drop off dramatically. want to freeze a "tile" of water? easy enough. The difficulty with the initial example is that it was a high particle voxel representation - awesome to do, but several orders of magnitude more than most mmos can handle reasonably (to be clear, I would enjoy seeing something like that, eventually - it's just not going to happen this game)

@mazikar well, the alpha is located on a world that, every eclipse, is over run by demons, so, you're going to need a fair amount of resources to build a suitable defense, to stay safe.

Holy-! I was taken entirely by surprise! Thanks for doing me the honor!

And we will get servers based on need - if there are only enough US players for 1 server, they place it based on player density - if 70% of the players are west coasters, it'll be in LA or OR. Want that Iowa server? get your midwest friends to buy in XD

@jetah Everyone's max max stat is, I believe 25 (or 30? it's been 2 months since I looked). 18 is the limit of human base stats, and it varies with the others, but everyone can get temporary buffs to any stat (in theory), up to +5 (or rather, it's been described as being "very hard" to boost to +5 - I'm assuming that's a soft cap - you "could" go higher, but doing so is so difficult it's functionally impossible)