Yes, well rape is realistic.  Going to the loo is realistic.  Vomiting after getting drunk is realistic, but do we really NEED it in a game?  Does it actually add anything?

From what I\'ve seen of getting drunk in games, it doesn\'t do much but get on people\'s nerves and result in folks having to leave their characters logged in for a bit until they sober up.  You can\'t fight while drunk, because you can\'t move and can\'t see.  You could build up your alcohol tolerance, but again, there wasn\'t really much point because there was a fine line between being drunk enough to fight and being too plastered to do anything, and that is NOT the sort of thing to experiment with while camping a mob.

I\'ve seen it done and quite honestly just found it to be \"fluff\".  It\'s cool for about ten minutes when you shout like every person before you \"OOoooo IMR DRUKK\"  But then you learn to immediately put a person on ignore after that...

And then you get to bore everyone in shouts and OOC by shouting \"LUK ART MUH EM DRUKK!\"

As a result the rest of us shut shouts and ooc off because you\'re annoying.

Games have had this feature and it honestly added nothing to the game.  What is the point of being drunk?  Supposedly it gave you strength modifiers, but it also lowered your wisdom, so in theory it was really good in a fight.  In reality, it just annoyed people.

No, rainmaker, I wouldn\'t.

What he has described has been done in EQ.  And it didn\'t work.  It has also been done in other games...and it doesn\'t work.  

Also, these same ideas have been brought up time and time again in various other threads and have been discussed and discarded ad nauseum.

So rather than writing off my \"criticism\" perhaps one should read the threads of what has already been proposed before posting them yet again.

This has been proposed in other games so that the world is more interactive.  However, this also means having very active GM\'s that can keep an eye on things ingame and the like.  How interactive the world will be could probably be discussed in another thread, as I\'d like to know how the dev\'s are going to handle that one.

Back to the cultures thing:  I\'m hoping for some more background as what I have read is rather intriguing but a bit vague, however as early as this project is, it\'s understandable.  I would indeed volunteer for this, but I don\'t know how many folks are on the team or what they\'re doing, hence trodding on toes is something I\'ll keep away from for the time being.

So, I\'ll keep the hope that we\'ll hear something on cultures soon.

Good grief, I just lost everything I wrote *screams*  Has anyone else been having trouble staying connected to the site?

Gah...right, I\'ll try again.  *bangs head on keyboard*

Ok.  The \"virtual pouch\".  I skipped it because I honestly didn\'t understand it and also because it once again seems to favour tanks and those with high strength, which I don\'t quite care for.  Sorry about that :/  But then I\'m not a developer so tell me to bugger off if you like.

So, if you cannot harvest items off monsters, where in the world do tailors or other crafters get their items?!  Do they have to buy them from NPCs?  Well that certainly takes the fun out of it.  The whole hope is that people will actually interact with each other, and not merely run around without talking to anyone else.  Would a crafter have to hunt for said items?  What if they\'re absolutely no good at hunting and, Well, who wants to \"pharm\"?  It\'s quite dull.

As for the use things in game rule - why does it need to be complex?  I don\'t think it\'s necessary for EVERYTHING to come off a mob.  Perhaps in some cases it\'s a \"trade secret\" as to what drops off what mob.  For example, if someone wishes for some items for making Klyros clothing (which I believe comes off aquatic animals only), one discovers that a particular fish is required.  However, there are three \"sub-species\".  One drops scale, another drops meat, and yet another drops bone for needles.  It is up to the hunter to be able to find out which is which, and to get an idea of what needs to be used to harvest it.  Worrying about poison or spells just gets too complicated, and it doesn\'t really need to be that difficult, IMO.

Conversely, when it comes to intelligent or humanoid races, yes we can see that the mob is carrying weapons and armour, and it probably has a pack and meat.  But it is really that all-fired necessary for someone to be able to strip it to the bone for everything.  I don\'t think so - suffice to say that coin and perhaps a magical item, or even a quest item, drops off the thing and leave it at that.

Let\'s take this a bit further:  there are people that really enjoying crafting and trading, and there are people who just want money and loot.  Now, with the option of harvesting for crafting, again this doesn\'t need to be complex, and it can be done in such a way that it encourages interaction with others, rather than just the NPC option (I\'d hate to see the trader \"mules\" of EQ come into play here in PS).

When I was tailoring in the above unmentionable game, I needed certain hides.  They only dropped off bears and pumas, and they were a \"green con\" (I didn\'t get experience to hunt them).  Now the choice was really boring farming, or getting the lower level characters who were already hunting for experience to save them for me.  They were very happy with the money I offered, they got experience, and I got hides to practice on.

Now, I have leather padding.  I make friends with a smith who is more than happy to take these off my hands.  Trouble is, he needs iron ore.  Now, in this game (silly, I know) iron ore dropped off a certain monster, and he was too high of a level and didn\'t want to \"pharm\".  However, I got experience, and I\'d go and kill these things, happily bring back as much ore as I could carry, and more often than not got some new armour in the process.

That\'s healthy interaction.  This same thing could be approached in PS.  Traders need a certain item.  There are hunters who really enjoy gathering such items off various mobs.  Let us suppose that the only creatures that actually drop items for crafting (for food or clothing or what have you) are animals.  Therefore, it\'s up to the specialised hunter to know just which animal to get items from and how.  After establishing a friendship with a trader, they now can do business together - trader buys items from hunter, hunter gains experience from the kill and coin from the trader, and the trader has wares.  There is no overburded market because supply and demand is totally balanced - the trader knows where to buy things, and the hunter knows where to sell.

Conversely, there are people that just want coin and experience only.  They don\'t want to be weighted down with things they won\'t use.  They just want to kill.  To them, the humanoid hunting is the most rewarding.  They get coin and experience, perhaps a magic item for use, or a quest item for their job or a task for learning or what have you.  They don\'t need to be bothered with trading and, because there\'s very little there to trade, they don\'t need to sell anything.  They can keep their hard earned money without it being a problem to anyone else, they don\'t need to leave their camp, and they never have to be bothered with unidentifiable \"bits\" that they have no idea what to do with.

Dividing up the mobs into crafting/money divisions would also take care of another problem in most MMORPG\'s - the higher level pharmer taking over an experience camp for lower level characters.  This is infinitely frustrating.  I can\'t count how many times I\'d journeyed through really nasty terrain with a group of mates in order to do some experience hunting and maybe get some decent items only to find that someone 30 levels higher was claiming that entire area (if not the entire zone) in order to farm materials or level up their character on another account (the park-and-play method, a huge cheat and utterly ridiculous).  Said person would often tell us to bugger off rather than just offer to buy the items off us after we did the killing, or if we did convince them, they\'d try to rob us blind, offering 1/10th of what the item was actually worth.  Again, this doesn\'t promote good interaction.

However, if mobs are divided into the cash/crafting way I mentioned above, such problems could almost entirely be eliminated.  Hunters for crafting items see experience as a nice bonus but they won\'t be robbing anyone who just wants experience alone from being able to achieve it.  People who just want experience won\'t be hogging a mob that a crafter needs for an item in order to sell it for a ridiculous amount, and it would also cut down on the \"camping\" syndrome quite a bit, as \"phat lewt\" wouldn\'t be driving force behind humanoid hunting.

Right, anyway, that\'s all I can think of for the moment.  I hope I\'m not beating the dead horse, but I think it\'s a really good system as long as it is kept simple and there isn\'t a whole lot of worrying about making it too \"realistic\" with all the concerns of corpse-stripping and the like.  The game is, after all, your own, and doesn\'t necessarily need to follow the laws of earth biology.

Once again, brought up in another thread...read some threads before you post, eh?


Language barriers - this doesn\'t work.  People are too lazy to learn other languages, and if you are rping in your own cultural language, people will immediately start shouting \"Speak common plz!\"  Hence, a pretty useless feature.

Faction rating; this too has been done.  From an rp standpoint it\'s really tiresome and ended up with supposedly \"evil\" races being played like non-evil races because people didn\'t \"want to really play an evil character, they just liked the stats and the looks.\"  It doesn\'t promote rp.  Besides, I don\'t think there is really any racial tensions of that sort in game, though I could be wrong.

Boat transport.  This is what made Another-Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named create portals for even faster transportation, because it took too long and people were sick of boats.  Gambling in games really detracts from gaming.  I don\'t even want to think about how many gambling scams I\'ve seen in EQ.

So, basically, what you\'ve just described is EQ.  And no, it\'s not even remotely rping.

I\'m not sure why you brought the example of having hundreds of jobs, because PlaneShift won\'t.   They have a finite example of jobs and they will concentrate upon them and make sure they\'re not \"meaningless\".  And even with a game that would have a hundred skills, you\'d still find someone specialised if, and only if, they concentrated on ONE skill and didn\'t try to be the minimart, as I previously stated.

I also don\'t understand how having 20 jobs or so can be considered \"everything\".  I\'m sure the devs have had the same problem with crafting as in the past, and they seem to have a clue about how to make things less boring and yet more interesting for people that really want to craft, not merely people who think it will bring in lots of money.  This has been addressed in another thread...and probably several others.

I think they\'ve got a handle on it, mate.