16
General Discussion / Re: The Seventh Annual PlaneShift Community Awards
« on: November 19, 2017, 03:11:03 am »
Biggest Mary Sue is going to be a little flame-baity if you ask me. I say keep it.
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17
General Discussion / Re: The Seventh Annual PlaneShift Community Awards
« on: November 18, 2017, 11:23:54 am »
If somebody can outfashion or be shadier than Geoni lets take it to the runway.
18
Complaint Department / Re: I want my account to be deleted.
« on: November 17, 2017, 11:25:01 pm »I may be missing the point here, not a power leveler by far, so please bear with me if I get things wrong. Not going to go personal to the level of quoting and replying to things that struck me as odd, I will try to address what seems to be the gist of what I got by skimming through this thread, which got too long too fast, and too bitter for me to read in full right now.
I was wondering, if people get bored by watching a dummy, why not go train with some mobs instead? Many exist in the arena itself, and the loot will make it worth their while more than the shattered straw of the dummies. Guessing the dummies were put there to help newbies get from level 0 to 1 and from 1 to 2, not power levelers who want to grind from 101 to 102. You want thrill, go fight a boss, that trains you too.
That said, I will make a suggestion to the devs that will help things out, at least IMHO: modify the game so that dummies only allow people to train a skill if it is below level 10. Then let people AFK train at the dummies all they want, knowing they will max at level 10 and will need to move to a mob to advance any further. That will make things more interesting than making the dummies a PvP area, and still allow newbies to train to a level that ensures they don't get instantly killed off by the first kikiri or one-eyed rat they try to fight.
As for Edico's original request, I would say wait it out till your ban ends, and if you are still resolute, log into the account and delete your character, then move on. After all this is only a game, and games are meant to help people have fun. If this one brings you no joy, then look for some other game that suits you better.
You do realize that mobs are repetitive as well and a lot of the stronger bosses require you to have like all your stats maxed and very high weapons/magic skill to face them alone if you don't have friends who are also around to help and of decent levels as well?
The only reason I see dummies having been implemented is because devs know how grinding is, but then team turns around and wants to police a lack of development/filler.
19
Complaint Department / Re: I want my account to be deleted.
« on: November 16, 2017, 11:21:54 pm »... If GMs are going to take enforcement on an action then it needs to be established in rules first."You may not be AFK (away from keyboard) and leave your character doing an action over and over by itself (e.g. fighting)."
...
Source: Rules page http://207.244.96.64/PlaneShift/smf/index.php?topic=31960.msg367016#msg367016
The idea of gaining skill is so that it's not so easy you max out everything in two weeks. Realistically if you were going to learn a task and become the best, a master it's going to take time, years even to fully master that craft. From what I understand it takes about 200hours to fully max any skill. That's just over a week (granted you are not going to do that at one time with no breaks!) But think about it, most of us do 12 years in school THEN go on to anywhere from 2-6 years of college, sometimes, even more, to fully become a professional at something. It's not that far-fetched. I know of SEVERAL players who have done it legitly, on multiple characters even. Some people choose to read while they grind, others utilize Netflix or youtube, or web browsing. Use windowed mode, we are not saying you have to stare AT your char 100% of the time, but you need to be glancing over at them every few minutes or so. We don't just ban lightly despite what you might think, most of the players who have been banned for this action got several warnings.Noone who gets to the point of getting a ban for it is unaware of the rule. And there are also several people who don't even bother to train they just RP or train idly when they do have the time.
Maybe we should put the dummies in a PvP zone
What's the difference between botting/scripting and afk training? Because you eventually need to click something to continue or you are scripting something. The rule words it like 'leave your character doing an action over and over by itself' when it should just be one 'over' here because repeating the action more than once (initiated before afking) requires a script. And I've been accused of 'afk training' when I was just alt-tabbing and didn't look at the screen for around 5-6 minutes because I was writing a post on a forum. But that's not being away from the keyboard. And the alt-tabbing thing is what I don't see in the rules. Indeed, you're posting here saying the 'legit' players would read or watch netflix windowed.
200 hours per skill is ridiculous by the way and it just highlights my point on why this isn't going to keep new players interested going forward. Especially when it'll get boring after about 4/200 hours of training that skill. And your use of real life skill building as a justification is far-fetched. Games are not real life and shouldn't take as long to learn a skill in as it takes in real life. And not only is skill-building in real life going to create a productive outcome but it likely isn't doing a repetitive motion for 200 hours straight.
As for the people who just RP and don't train, I used to be one of those people back in my early years on PS after I was introduced to RP around half a year in, because I found RP so interesting I more or less abandoned training/questing/mining platinum for the guild. But the problem with not training but RPing comes when you want to play a character who knows a decent bit of magic (at least most of the tiers) which requires an even worse form of grinding and questing for glyphs, or has some combat skills and could feasibly fight a monster and kill it or in the least fight it without dying in 2-4 hits. But because of your always having to be IC rule you have to grind in order to justify IC skills. Or completely avoid monsters so you don't die even though your character isn't a weakling/coward in how you intend to RP them. Thus, Planeshift's mechanics are putting a restraint on people who want to be fully dedicated to RP.
You can say "If you want it you should work for it." That's fair but when the grind is very time-consuming and very boring, who would want to? In fact people with time restraints may not even be able to.
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Complaint Department / Re: I want my account to be deleted.
« on: November 16, 2017, 08:29:44 pm »
I have to echo that the GMs are being kinda problematic about the issue with the dummies. It's obvious that they were created for the sake of training and grinding skills but to get onto people who are alt-tabbed because it's absolutely boring to just sit there for hours and watch your character hit a dummy for a minute after making one click of the mouse and instead expecting people to stare at the screen for hours with the only action you have to take being a click of the mouse is expecting people to endure absolute boredom. And it's absolute boredom to bring for example your axe skill level up from say 100 to 101/102 and not do anything else because you don't want to get banned. At the end of the day do you expect people to still want to play this game instead of something else if you're going to force that experience on someone?
I understand GMs have concerns about it because of botting but there's a clear difference between alt-tab training and botting. The problem comes in when somebody is alt-tabbed, they get turned around, and then suspected on botting when they don't respond for a few minutes. Before GMs decide to take action they need to at least wait 20 minutes because I don't see somebody botting for less than 20 minutes, but with alt-tabbing it seems reasonable to not respond for a few minutes. I've gotten warned by a GM one time who just straight up said 'take care of afk training' and jumped offline before I could even give a response, and I mean immediately. I don't see 'afk training' being against the rules even though things like scripts/botting or taking advantage of bugs are. If GMs are going to take enforcement on an action then it needs to be established in rules first.
But to not get long winded, why were dummies developed if they're going to be policed like this? Because if you're going to police people like this you might as well just expect people to grind their weapons on mobs, which is equally redundant. This is especially problematic when your ability to deal with enemies relies on specifically raising the weapons or magic skills, which are extremely painful to raise.
Staff needs to take this as an example of what happens when problematic and boring developed features are policed - you drive away your playerbase. Which is already hurting in numbers. Sorry if this comes off as an attack but I truly do like Planeshift's world and lore and I hate to see it die out due to a lacking playerbase. I feel like Unreal Engine is going to lure more players in and the unfair policing of forcing people to partake in a very boring feature needs to be addressed before it causes a controversy in the next generation of players that Unreal may attract and gives the game bad word of mouth.
Quick edit to add another note: Grinding is also more or less filler due to a lack of development of a larger world with more to fight and skill-build with. So with it being filler you ought to just let things like afk training slide until a more fleshed out game is built and the grinding is less time consuming. And the 100-200 levels of skills need to be made less time consuming.
I understand GMs have concerns about it because of botting but there's a clear difference between alt-tab training and botting. The problem comes in when somebody is alt-tabbed, they get turned around, and then suspected on botting when they don't respond for a few minutes. Before GMs decide to take action they need to at least wait 20 minutes because I don't see somebody botting for less than 20 minutes, but with alt-tabbing it seems reasonable to not respond for a few minutes. I've gotten warned by a GM one time who just straight up said 'take care of afk training' and jumped offline before I could even give a response, and I mean immediately. I don't see 'afk training' being against the rules even though things like scripts/botting or taking advantage of bugs are. If GMs are going to take enforcement on an action then it needs to be established in rules first.
But to not get long winded, why were dummies developed if they're going to be policed like this? Because if you're going to police people like this you might as well just expect people to grind their weapons on mobs, which is equally redundant. This is especially problematic when your ability to deal with enemies relies on specifically raising the weapons or magic skills, which are extremely painful to raise.
Staff needs to take this as an example of what happens when problematic and boring developed features are policed - you drive away your playerbase. Which is already hurting in numbers. Sorry if this comes off as an attack but I truly do like Planeshift's world and lore and I hate to see it die out due to a lacking playerbase. I feel like Unreal Engine is going to lure more players in and the unfair policing of forcing people to partake in a very boring feature needs to be addressed before it causes a controversy in the next generation of players that Unreal may attract and gives the game bad word of mouth.
Quick edit to add another note: Grinding is also more or less filler due to a lack of development of a larger world with more to fight and skill-build with. So with it being filler you ought to just let things like afk training slide until a more fleshed out game is built and the grinding is less time consuming. And the 100-200 levels of skills need to be made less time consuming.
21
Newbie Help (Start Here) / Re: From one Beta Tester to the Dev Team & the future.
« on: November 09, 2017, 01:48:38 am »
There was a point in time when it was very rare to see a GM doing an event. Or maybe I wasn't online during the right times, but I'm pretty sure they were uncommon. So I appreciate that GMs are doing events now despite the criticism, I know running events with at least 20 people can be very challenging and sometimes things are improvised but either way I in no way think they shouldn't keep it up. The thing about it is we should push our fellow players to go one step beyond the event and RP about what the event addressed if there's a means. I was one of those people who didn't RP until someone used Geoni as a means of hiding and as a result putting him the middle of RP. And after that the rest was history because I was fascinated with the storytelling it pulled my character into and fell in love with RP. We've gotta somehow put new players in the middle of our storylines somehow if there's a way to ( 
) socially entrap them in interesting situations. This has always been the case when it comes to answering that age old question of how you can bring the population of RPers up, it's really all I can say when it comes to what we have the power to do as players, aside from also running events which never hurts.
As for unreal engine, I see potential in it, don't think it can't help but give the game more allure. To be frank, the graphics are outdated and it can be somewhat offputting when set beside other options. Not only that, but there needs to be a push to complete the lemur and diaboli models and the Ylian female model because that also comes off as bizarre for a model of one race being used to represent another and breaks the immersion visually. That, and I feel like the game can only be helped if they build more places, perhaps have more dungeons with a sense of interaction like the lavar cave (even though I find it a bit awkward I appreciate it) and with interesting architecture. I know this just straight up a matter of manpower but if the game is to be improved it needs more skilled folks who are somehow willing to dedicate their skills to the game for free.
Mechanics wise, I think the enemies need to be nerfed, they seem to have buffed them up way too much. There is always something in every dungeon that can kill a new player or even somebody who has intermediate skills yet have built skills for at least a month. Perhaps set up a main storyline that has a purpose of building up the character in a rising level of difficulties, sending them through dungeons that get harder as the storyline progresses, not just having them wander a bit aimlessly.
) socially entrap them in interesting situations. This has always been the case when it comes to answering that age old question of how you can bring the population of RPers up, it's really all I can say when it comes to what we have the power to do as players, aside from also running events which never hurts. As for unreal engine, I see potential in it, don't think it can't help but give the game more allure. To be frank, the graphics are outdated and it can be somewhat offputting when set beside other options. Not only that, but there needs to be a push to complete the lemur and diaboli models and the Ylian female model because that also comes off as bizarre for a model of one race being used to represent another and breaks the immersion visually. That, and I feel like the game can only be helped if they build more places, perhaps have more dungeons with a sense of interaction like the lavar cave (even though I find it a bit awkward I appreciate it) and with interesting architecture. I know this just straight up a matter of manpower but if the game is to be improved it needs more skilled folks who are somehow willing to dedicate their skills to the game for free.
Mechanics wise, I think the enemies need to be nerfed, they seem to have buffed them up way too much. There is always something in every dungeon that can kill a new player or even somebody who has intermediate skills yet have built skills for at least a month. Perhaps set up a main storyline that has a purpose of building up the character in a rising level of difficulties, sending them through dungeons that get harder as the storyline progresses, not just having them wander a bit aimlessly.
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General Discussion / Re: The Cycles and Cycles 750AY: Why Shouldn't the Cycles Change with Real Time?
« on: November 01, 2017, 03:22:13 am »From what I heard and understood the date currently, never progresses past 750 AY. And if something happens today then five years pass it happened on 745 AY. Confusing. Yes, I know. So I guess if you date something for today every year you have to go back and change the date?
So if a couple has a child in this year they have to date the birth back a year each time that child grows a year older but in doing so they have to date back their growing relationship with their partner, date back other things that led to it, and so on, until it becomes a jumbled mess of character history. It makes no sense from a setting standpoint not to just pass the years with ours. If the settings team is making some big event happen in 750 and that's the reason why, why not just have the big event happen in 766?
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General Discussion / The Cycles and Cycles 750AY: Why Shouldn't the Cycles Change with Real Time?
« on: October 30, 2017, 01:59:19 am »
Sorry if this has been discussed to death at some point but I searched 750AY and didn't really find a thread about it, but why are we stuck in the year 750 AY? I'm genuinely interested in why because from a RP perspective it is really confusing to start your first year of RPing here and decide that your character is say, 25 years old, meaning they were born in 725 AY. And so you have been RPing this character for over a year, to the month of their birthday, how can it make sense to start the same cycle over again and it not be 751? The only way to age this character would be to move their birthday back a cycle but in doing so that might alter some aspects of their history, such as when they were schooled, when they got their first job, etc. I can't recall if the answer was something along the lines of 'don't think into it' or something else but I am wondering why it was determined that we stay in this cycle.
Even from a community and development standpoint, it can make sense to move on to 751AY, 752AY, etc by having historical moments occur each year that make that cycle remembered for ____ or ____. Not only that, but I can see it as a means of bridging community RP with an ongoing development of the game, especially since I have heard (I think through the GM Q&A) that lore is being developed in a way that progresses the story of the game in general. I feel like maybe allowing the cycles to move with that developing story might solve the birthday/age dilemma as well as allow for a new and contemporary timeline to begin playing out in an interesting historical sense.
Even from a community and development standpoint, it can make sense to move on to 751AY, 752AY, etc by having historical moments occur each year that make that cycle remembered for ____ or ____. Not only that, but I can see it as a means of bridging community RP with an ongoing development of the game, especially since I have heard (I think through the GM Q&A) that lore is being developed in a way that progresses the story of the game in general. I feel like maybe allowing the cycles to move with that developing story might solve the birthday/age dilemma as well as allow for a new and contemporary timeline to begin playing out in an interesting historical sense.
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The Hydlaa Plaza / Re: Real life - messing around with magick
« on: October 12, 2017, 09:19:12 pm »
I don't believe in magic but the spirit world, divination, things like that. I'm not entirely close-minded to it. I'm pretty skeptical but I've been spooked before. And had an accurate reading from somebody who practices Vodun.
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General Discussion / Re: Names of craftable consumables for the Kran
« on: October 07, 2017, 06:41:25 pm »
'kranic'
Um...YES. Can this be a universally agreed upon name for anything that inebriates a Kran please?
I'm a Kran player but I'm no chemist so I wouldn't know where to start when it came to ingredients that would seem plausible for inebriating a mineral based fantasy race.
Um...YES. Can this be a universally agreed upon name for anything that inebriates a Kran please?
I'm a Kran player but I'm no chemist so I wouldn't know where to start when it came to ingredients that would seem plausible for inebriating a mineral based fantasy race.
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The Hydlaa Plaza / Re: Back for some occasional RP
« on: September 18, 2017, 08:09:39 pm »
Well yeah I haven't checked out irc in a while but I do remember it mostly being lurkers/staff/not in my timezone. Not sure if a discord could be linked to the irc. A PS-RP discord channel shouldn't be hard to make and I could whip one up in no-time, but it depends if anyone here uses discord (most gamers use it over skype now).
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General Discussion / Re: RP Not Required?
« on: September 18, 2017, 02:24:10 am »
There have been people not being in character throughout the entire time I've played Planeshift if I remember correctly. As much as I'd like to see everyone be in character a lot of people play for the questing and other things, and it can't really be moderated unless you have like 10 GMs online and watching things like a hawk. So it'll always be a thing.
Personally when I see somebody running around on Geoni I just have him move out of their way and sometimes comment on how 'people are too rushed in this city' or something similar when it happens.
Personally when I see somebody running around on Geoni I just have him move out of their way and sometimes comment on how 'people are too rushed in this city' or something similar when it happens.
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The Hydlaa Plaza / Re: Back for some occasional RP
« on: September 17, 2017, 10:15:34 pm »
Hey I'm back to being back for some occasional RP.
I found a new WoW RP server but I still think about this place every now and then and get a weirdly nostalgic urge to RP on my crazy old Kran. It's always easiest for me to stay in touch with people through discord. Does planeshift have one?
Edit: Sorry if I'm breaking a rule here doubleposting/necroing the the thread, just didn't want to clutter with a new one.
I found a new WoW RP server but I still think about this place every now and then and get a weirdly nostalgic urge to RP on my crazy old Kran. It's always easiest for me to stay in touch with people through discord. Does planeshift have one?
Edit: Sorry if I'm breaking a rule here doubleposting/necroing the the thread, just didn't want to clutter with a new one.
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General Discussion / Re: You Might Be An Oldbie If...
« on: March 11, 2016, 06:01:54 pm »
You might be a oldbie if you've had to replace expired images in your sig every time you return to lurk. Or you're like me and you have no time for anything anymore.
Also hi.
Also hi.
30
General Discussion / Re: RolePlay
« on: June 29, 2015, 06:47:02 pm »
Kran are only hard to play when your kran doesn't identify as male or female and you gotta use the kranouns all the time. 
One of my suggestions to making the unsociability of kran more interesting and interactive is to either force them into a situation with some sort of backstory (I've been sent here to do ___, ___ stole something from me and now I'm searching for them, my friend ___ is causing trouble and I should probably do something about it, etc). That, or take inspiration from antisocial behavioral disorders. Just partially though, since they're good natured or come from a place where they don't see the wrong in what they're doing. When you throw a certain cultural background into a melting pot like Hydlaa, there's going to be mixed reactions and it's great to focus on the bad reactions your character gets ICly, because that's where conflict grows from.
At the end of the day, with kran or any of the races for that matter, the amount you're able to do with your character comes from the amount you're able to interpret from established lore, rather than just taking it for face value and not deviating (...deviating reasonably).
One of my suggestions to making the unsociability of kran more interesting and interactive is to either force them into a situation with some sort of backstory (I've been sent here to do ___, ___ stole something from me and now I'm searching for them, my friend ___ is causing trouble and I should probably do something about it, etc). That, or take inspiration from antisocial behavioral disorders. Just partially though, since they're good natured or come from a place where they don't see the wrong in what they're doing. When you throw a certain cultural background into a melting pot like Hydlaa, there's going to be mixed reactions and it's great to focus on the bad reactions your character gets ICly, because that's where conflict grows from.
At the end of the day, with kran or any of the races for that matter, the amount you're able to do with your character comes from the amount you're able to interpret from established lore, rather than just taking it for face value and not deviating (...deviating reasonably).