[SPLIT] Progression and seasoned chars (was magic resistance)

[bilbous]

Korumak I don't understand how you can expect to "stand a chance against seasoned characters, and characters that have been on the server for years." Have you ever played a game where this was possible? What is the point of playing if you can never improve yourself? And yet, some of those characters have never done a bit of training as their focus has been on playing out their little melodramas and whatnot.

There is no doubt that training in this game is very slow. My character is quite old, singular name and all, and while his stats are maxed he does not have one skill at 100. Now If I had never taken any breaks from the game he might have had a few but you want to take him out in a few weeks of lackadaisical training? I don't think that is proper. There are a few characters who have managed it by intensive training in just a few skills and there is nothing wrong with that .

Anyway you never have to fight anyone you do not want to.

[Korumak]

Well Bilbous, I don't under stand....  ok, separate, I was proving a point earlier.

And to answer your questions?

"Have you ever played a game where this was possible?"  Yes I have, called Werewolf, its a really good Role playing game.  You could "Max out a character" in less than 2 months.  Why cause the game was about role playing, story telling and not stat monsters.
"Whats the point in playing if you cant improve your self?"  Gee don't know, for the story? (kind of like I'll have max out my strength, whats the point of living! <jumps from the roof of a building>)  Theres an extreme sense of great distance between levels vs no distance in levels.  Yeah lets all Join fight club as pencil necked geeks and every one looks like Arnold in their prime! and we know it will take beatings of years before we can keep up!  /joke  to improve is one thing, to be superman and wonder why the newbies don't want to hang around supermen... hence the point i was making.
I can see the point of the characters that have been around for years, so least you should be willing to see PS from the perspective of someone just arriving.  Weither thats the monstrance long climb to get up there, or the the points i brought up earler.  Trying to make me out to be the some sort, 'Old timer hater' isnt flying.
I play Stats to Character, meaning if the stats aint there I don't RP it.  So since no living person can realistically have maxed all stats, i don't max all stats.  I don't think anyone should max all stats, and it should be very tough to Max 1, and two should be darn near impossible.

And as to your last question, "you want to take him out in a few weeks of lackadaisical training?" One got nothing personaly against your character, dont think mine or yours have properly met.  But let me toss you a senario, something to consider.

We all work hard on our characters, getting them to their levels.  Now we want an interesting plot line.  Someone comes up with a really good concept for a villen which in this case requires combat.  Now this person can either a completely ignore the in game rule system (bad form for many reasons) spend the next 6 months grinding away at the character to get him close to were he's going to stand up to one or two weapons fire from the group in whats sure to be an epic battle.  Or he can take the next two years to power up a new character while others are powering up theirs.

From everything i see, you seem to be wanting to pull for the final option.  Bilbous, we aren't talking about taking anything away from your character, or other characters, we are talking game mechanics here.  In PS even you I hope would admit that the Progression system is rather LONG.  and thus you have very large gaps between the New, and the Been around, that to a newbie, or new character the gap seems extraordinarily wide. 

The newbies are walking around with a lot of "Arnold's in their prime" and theres not much of a middle ground.  I can site examples of this all day filling up screen after screen of it.  So I'll leave you with one final example.  We have a Villian right now in game.  He's been randomly (seemingly) dropping "newbies/non-combat characters" left and right.  So about 12 of us got together... you know what, he was still stronger than us 12 "newbies", so end result is the villain is still out there.  Granted I the player like the Villains player and got nothing but good wishes, but theres a "Good guys to bring down the bad guy" plotline that died because of the tremendous gap.  Not everyone wants to play "Combat, max stat monsters" but when our characters get looped into certain plot-lines.... it shows it self virtually killing a plot line.
So thus I hope that answers your questions, and the thread can return back to its original intent.

[valentineaaron]

I agree with you Korumak.  Part of the problem with the game now is it favors those who have nothing better to do and are on for hours each day.  It's not fair for people who pop in maybe an hour a day because they will be much weaker then others.  I understand wanting us to work hard to level and train our characters but I think one of the issues is that if you don't have unlimited time to spend on the game you just can't match the others which isn't fair at all.  And that isn't mentioning how puny new players are compared to those who have been here for years.

I am not sure what a good solution would be though.  If you make it easy to level up you'll just have a bunch of maxed out players running around which is a little silly.  I think the way they have gone where levelling up still helps but not nearly as much as before is a good idea.  If you make it so that someone with a 50 skill in axes can still fight someone with a 100 skill it makes levelling a lot less necessary.  You can still do it but you don't have to in other words.

I think seperating out magic and physical combat will do that as well though.  You can still do both but not at once.  You can be a super warrior but have to give up the magic.  But if you want you can take off the armor and cast magic as well.  No one is saying you can't be both.  You just can't do both at the same time in the same fight.

[LigH]

PlaneShift used to promote itself as "roleplaying preferring" game years ago; today it appears rather like the only available solution for players who are not unemployed: Roleplay the skills you can't level, ignore the game mechanics.

[Korumak]

I have to agree with LigH there, mainly second half of what he said (as I wasn't around for the first so I'll take his word on it), and believe me I want the game mechanics to support the RP. And in a fight where its do or Die... I go Game mechanics, unless theres something specific we are looking for in the RP fight.

I fire a fireball at Bad guy
vs
Seeing a fireball go flying out

I'll take the second every time.  And I have seen folks wondering around literally with "PVP" stats that they play for dueling and role play fighting in OOC. The few I checked on their character's actual stats where no where near it.  That just pretty much well one insults the folks who are trying to get their characters to 'that level' where it fits and have been putting time and effort to make it there.  It also turns PS into a 3D role playing chat. (which might just be an interesting Dev project)
Granted I would love to have a character come in as a "Seasoned Character" already ripe for role play and i didn't have to dig mine, go through 100+ quests to role play it out.  Think of all the villains we could go through! 

I think the "Optimal solution" But one that well probably can't ever really be put in place on a sliding scale, is something similar to "Least amount of time in that character" = Less difficulty leveling /practicing / Stat progression.  Longer a character is online, the more difficult it is, to a certain point.  This would give those folks with, say 1-3 hours a day or less, be a bit easier for them to catch up.  Even then I can see issues with that kind of a system, and how it could be abused. [Like max pointers who had all day make up 6 different accounts and quickly power up 24 characters, multi-client and you got a small army for instance]

And yeah I'm one of the Job seekers that has spare time waiting on the phone to ring after pounding the pavement.  I personally RP first, help out new folks if needed, and Grind third.  We all know there are slow spots during the day when nothings going on, and wanting the characters we play with to do something like go flame some rats, which is quite amusing. (Note: need a way to power down Flame burst to catch rats on fire so they can run around some more after a certain point.)

All I want to my self is catch up and get to the point where my character who I want him to be, meets stats, then I'll just hunt Ulbers for hearts / props, and make helms just to help out the newbies.  But then all of us comes from a different background and have different times to spend on an MMORPG.  Do I like slowly gaining on the veterans because I seem to have more time then they do... some times, I haven't passed anyone for all I know.  And in a way their my beta testers cause my guild mates help point me in the right direction.   Then again not every player has that, or wants to join a guild.

So back to the topic at hand magic resistance.  I know its still in testing phases, and unfortunately I don't have access to what got resistance to what, and by how much. (would be nice) I just hope eventually for the players sake each monster get limited to resistance in just one way.   In the story you got the conflicted story of, "in the end you will choose one way" "I am a <name of the way> Way Mage", but with the critters being immune to like two ways... let alone in the survivability category, narrows down the choosing with tons of trial an error on the players parts.  Plus there are quests that involve items of different ways, in order to get something needed for quests down the line.  So its like getting two conflicting sets of instructions from the game as to how I level and choose which way to go.  And if I don't know about the flip side, I as a CW mage hit a category of critters that, Monster 1, Resistant to RW and CW Monster two is CW and DW... and there the only ones i have found that don't kill me after a few points... as a player, I would get frustrated fast.  Just a thought. (and a short-er post from me]

[novacadian]

One aspect of PS which seems to be little used is the Game Time. On my first rpg table top game world experience there was a Game Time which was at the ratio of one Game Month per Real Week.

The first order of business when getting together with the Game Master would be to train your character up to Present Game Time. One would then head off to adventure.

If training were simply based on how much Game Time had passed since last logging the character on instead how much time the player played then a lot of these hassles would disappear  and online playing time could be spent role playing.

You log in and before the map is loaded you are told how much Game Time has passed since you last loaded the character and how many Training Points you are credited for that time. You can than assign those points to the areas of training you wish to be trained. If not used at that time then they would be lost and it would be assumed that your character had done no training during that Game Time.

Game play would take place, in the rpg world, from one month behind Game Present to Game Present. One could not move their character into the future. In the same way players could coast along within the game clock on PS. If they decided to use it for training then fine; otherwise they could simply role play.

With such a system players could create lots of alts and place them in cold storage to bring them out for rps when they are ready to be trained up to meet the needs of an rp. Such a system would go a long way to removing all the hassle of time spent getting a character ready to actually play it; in terms of how everyone claims things are meant to be played around here. That is Role Playing and not Power Levelling.

Too radical? Probably. Practical for role playing? Damn straight.

- Nova

[bilbous]

You are always going to have these problems in a game that has training. Perhaps you would be better off trying to convince the developers to implement some character creation system where the four characters on an account have an arbitrary maximum limit for total development and their starting skill set is set manually.

By this I mean if you want to create a monster character you can allocate all discretionary startup points to the first character and while it still exists any other character starts with base stats say 25 and no skills. This system could allow for that one monster character to have max stats and four or five maxed skills. If a player wanted to spread out the points then his four characters could all have middling stats and one or two excellent skills. It would be even better if the marginal rate for the next stat/skill level were increased significantly.

The character creation system is outdated and has not kept up with the rest of development. It should be completely revamped and changed from its current obscure system to a completely transparent -- this is what you can do and what you can start with -- system. It is this system that most puts the lie to the Role Play predominance theory of PlaneShift.

[Bonifarzia]

I agree that the character creation will need some rework sooner or later, but trade-offs between characters per account are quite meaningless. People will just register one new account per desired character. But stronger options for character creation that ease the startup of secondary characters for RPers that already spent some time to get to know the game seem a very reasonable thing to me.

(Idle) time based progression as implied by Nova is no solution on its own, but it can make a fine ingredient. Apart from the mentioned and elsewhere discussed character creation, the time spent with social activity would make a great short term booster for the efficiency of your training activities. Or rephrasing the same thing: It would be nice if repetitive grinding would gradually lose its efficiency unless you balance your characters work life balance a little  

[bilbous]

Meaningless? I suppose so but not everyone wants to bother with multiple accounts and people will suss the abusers out pretty quickly. Anyway I'm just spitballin.

[Tumaini]

Some interesting related ideas, often meant to lessen the gap between casual and "power" players, that have been successfully implemented by other games are:
* Offline time gives a certain number of points per hour. When you log in you can choose to put these points into something, as if your character had been working during your offline time. This bonus is fairly small compared to actually being logged in and working on the same thing.
* Offline time gives a bonus after login to all/certain actions you do, meaning you get more experience/practice points while the "sleep" bonus lasts. You might e.g. gain 50% more experience/practice points for a limited time, depending on how long you were offline, then the bonus disappears until you accumulate more offline time.

[valentineaaron]

I kind of like the idea of gaining points when you are offline as well.  I think that would even it out for those who don't play so much like me and others who have no job currently and are at home quite a bit.  Right now the game gives to much advantage to grinders who just sit all day training.

[Korumak]

Something did occur to me last night, something based on Nova's idea, sort of.

Set up two kinds of "Characters"

• Questable
• Non-Questable

Your questable ones are your standard Grind and shine like we got now.  Thus thoes interested in playing the game with a new character can do so as per normal.

The second kind, Non questable, there basically Role Play only characters.  They cant train, they cant quest.  What they can do however is start with higher level stuff than normaly.  Say 75% of your highest rated Playable character.  These characters can be used for those who "Strictly RP" so we can use them as ad-hoc 'villians', or Role-play only characters who just say, Tavern hop, the wandering bards etc.

This way the Dev's get the testers through normal players, and those who are into the RP aspects, can pop a brand new one customized to their wants or needs.  Since its "75%" you run with your hero character to generate say building points or some such mechanism, and thus when you need to bring in an RP only character, you can do so.  They don't even have to be "Limited to 75%" after all they cant "Gain experience" or get stronger etc.  It could also be based on account time in PS.

Just a thought, might cure one issue.

[valentineaaron]

Interesting concept, so those characters wouldn't not level up at all and be locked in a sense.  I have seen other games where you start out with a premade character who is at a certain level so you don't have to do all the grinding to get there.  I could see that working if you put a time on for those who can play those, say they have to have played a certain amount of hours in game first.

[Mekora]

They also shouldn't be allowed to loot or do anything else that is profitable for their main char. This would probably be very difficult on the devs though.

[valentineaaron]

I personally think alts shouldn't be allowed to help each other or the main anyway.  One reason I think they should make certain glyphs easier to get such as the sleep glyph.  It's kind of weird that you have to use an alt to get them.