Mistakes You dont want to see Repeated

[tygerwilde]

SWG has a whacked out economy. really, a newbie has NO chance in that game if they wanna do things themselves. it\'s a good game, I love it, but the economy needs a lot of work. when I first logged on, I looked at the marketplace and saw that there was nothing there that wasn\'t at least 1000 creds. I\'m an artisan and I personally put my things up at 100- 300 creds, but that\'s really rare to see. I\'ll be puttin my vehicles up at 1000, but that\'s about the most expensive thing I\'m gonna sell.

the worst part is, when you do try to sell at a lower rate, other artisans buy it just to get it off the market.


and player looting. the ability to loot all of someones items really gives too much to the griefers. And it\'s ALWAYS  a mistake to empower griefers.

[Niber]

Originally posted by RussianVodka
Can you repeat that... i think you misstiped...

What i think you mean is a warrior has a giant spike on his right shulder and nothing on his left?

somewhat like this: http://home.cogeco.ca/~eligio/graphics/nwn.jpg


Tygerwilde: you are so wrong, a newbie can get filthfy rich easy in that game, the 2nd day I played the trial I reached the trial credit limit of 50.000 and with that I can buy alot of things.

[ForteX]

I agree with the numbers mistake not getting repeated... about the economy, a fully player driven economy is (IMO) way better than a npc driven one. Gives the artisans/crafters better chances of selling their items. I remember playing iRO a long time ago... they were hacked so often that the market was the most unstable one I had ever seen (one day something is worth millions, the next day people are dropping it =P). Deformable terrain is a nice thing to have too. A huge mistake that should not be done is the game world never evolving. By that I mean new areas, events, etc...

[DepthBlade]

Originally posted by Niber
Tygerwilde: you are so wrong, a newbie can get filthfy rich easy in that game, the 2nd day I played the trial I reached the trial credit limit of 50.000 and with that I can buy alot of things.

Well what do you expect if you play 7-10 hrs straight

[[azrael]]

Xordan

/me agrees. in \"rl\" an experianced swordsman would hate to come across a newbie; the reason being the swordsman has no idea what the newbs going to do

[Kiva]

/me agrees. in \"rl\" an experianced swordsman would hate to come across a newbie; the reason being the swordsman has no idea what the newbs going to do

From what you write in your post, it\'s pretty obvious you\'re not a skilled swordsman in real life, and have no clue how such a person would think.

First of all, to be a skilled swordsman, you have to pass years of training with the sword, during which you also learn how to block, dodge and read other people\'s styles. If you can not do this, you\'d be dead long ago.

Now, a rookie swordsman would have rough movements, no abilities to dodge blows and would wear out after a short time, due to the fact that he\'s not used to fighting with swords. His style would be easy for the experienced swordsman to read, and it would be more than easy to take him out.

However what Xordan is referring to is that a rookie swordsman can still cut someone\'s arm off if he/she is not paying attention, or is busy fighting someone else. All it requires is a hard blow by a sharp sword on an unarmored place. But in a one on one fight, a rookie would be easily downed by an experienced player due to the fact that he knows how to handle the sword, and the rookie doesn\'t.

You must also remember swords are heavy. They can\'t be thrown around like in a stickfight. If your attack gets blocked, you have to be wicked strong and skilled to keep your sword in your hands, and actually hit with it again before your opponent hits you. The only way to make lucky hits would be if you had some kind of diversion or something to attract the other\'s attention, or if the other one is wounded and incapable of protecting himself. Swordfighting isn\'t as easy as it seems.

By the way, why do you think assassins always attack from the back or when people are sleeping? That\'s when they have the biggest chance of not getting hurt themselves. They\'re cowards.

[Xordan]

Yes, an assassin is a good example of what I mean. If a rookie assassin cuts a strong players throat when he\'s asleep, he should just die, not take 2 damage, stand up, say \"haha, I\'m not dead coz I\'ve got a toughness of 32423452 points!!!\" and splat the rookie. I very much doubt that anyones skin could get tougher than steel.

[dfryer]

Yeah, I\'d like to see slightly less superhuman abilities - no matter how \"thick\" your skin is, most axes will slice through your bare neck, rendering you quite dead.  (Unless maybe you\'re a Kran..)

[SaintNuclear]

Degradation of items.
Yeah, yeah, I know it\'s not real and stuff, but degrading items would suck.
Throwing a newbly-bought sword away after killing 10 monsters is annoying and stupid.

And even if items will degrade, don\'t overdo it!
A two-handed sword fresh from the smithy shouldn\'t get rusty after ten gametime days, and break after twenty.
Actually, if the realism is so important, item degradation will be so slow, that implementing a system that degrades the items will be absolutely useless.
It doesn\'t take one week for steel to rust. It doesn\'t take a year either. It takes no less than five, and even more if you didn\'t put it in an extremely humid place.

And swords breaking? Yeah, right. What kind of sword breaks after you used it to cut someone\'s head off? Even a plastic sword won\'t break from that!
Maybe if you strike with the sword on a rock repeatedly it\'ll break, but I really doubt that striking rocks will be implemented.

As for food, yes, degradation should be implemented. A banana isn\'t eatable after a month. Also, food is something you consume, you don\'t use it for months of gametime. You buy bread, and eat it in less than a week. The only times you\'ll keep food for more than a few days is when you go on a quest far from civilization, in wich case you\'ll be able to keep food like dried meat, wich takes longer to rot.

[karakth]

Swords should break if badly made or struck by a much stronger sword (It happened in James Bond: Die Another Day...Man they\'ve shown that movie on TV like seven times now, and each time I happened to be in the room, so I watched it). A sword should not break after much use, but become notched, and slightly less effective.

But I agree that item deterioration needs to be controlled.

P.S. Have you ever tried cutting someone\'s head off with a plastic sword?

[SaintNuclear]

Originally posted by karakth
A sword should not break after much use, but become notched, and slightly less effective.

I don\'t think it should become notched, maybe blunt. And if it becomes blunt, you can sharpen it on a grindstone. Of course, a smith is skilled with grindstone so he\'ll make a better job at sharpening it...


And no, I never tried cutting someone\'s head with a plastic sword, but I doubt it\'ll break from the impact (it probebly won\'t be able to cut through it either).

[RonHiler]

People, item deterioration is in MMORPGs for a very good reason.  Its not there just to annoy you.

Your idea that items should hang around indefinitely or for months on the ground is unworkable.  Conisder a popular hunting area, where lots of critters are killed by players on a regular basis.  Each of these critter deaths result in items dropped.

A lot of times, critters will drop junk that no one wants, so it lies on the ground.  If the game lets this junk sit there for months, imagine the buildup of junk lying around.  Eventually you would have hundreds of newby swords (for instance) sitting on the ground.

And whenever a player walks into the landblock, data for each and every one of those items lying on the ground has to be transmitted to their client from the server.  I can think of no better way to induce massive lag than that.  Not just for the player entering the overfull landblock, but for everyone in game, since the server will be spending an overabundance of time transmitting item data rather than handling everyone else\'s packets for movement, combat, crafting, whatever.

(As an example of this from another game, in AC torches were given special treatment. Because they provide light, they didn\'t decay so fast when put on the ground (which is to say they stuck around for about an hour rather than decay within ten minutes as was usual for most items).  Because of this, some players collected torches and spelled out words with them (for their guild or whatever message they thought was clever).  After a bit, Turbine made this practice against the ToS, because it was causing undo server lag.  And that\'s an item that sat around for an hour rather than months, and just a dozen of them rather than hundreds.  What you are talking about is orders of magnitude worse!  In the *very* popular hunting spots in AC, even with the 10 minute decay, junk buildup was still pretty significant.  Turbine tried to solve this by insta-decaying critter bodies immediately after they were looted, which I think helped).

Not to mention the amount of drive space taken up the data entries in the database from all those useless items lying around.  With your method, eventually you would have thousands or millions of such entries in the database taking up space for no good reason.

You should always consider the effect on the server when you ask for new or different features.  There are limits the team has to work with, and bandwidth is one of them (a big one, in fact).

HTH,

Ron

[Kiva]

A lot of times, critters will drop junk that no one wants, so it lies on the ground.

That sentence is the only thing in your post that proves anything. And do you want to know what it proves? It proves you know absolutely nothing about how PS will work.

First of all, \"critters\" will not drop useless items. If they drop useless items, the dev team is in close contact with the players, and will be informed about these useless items. They will be removed from the game if the game has no need for this useless item.

Second of all, \"critters\" wont drop anything they do not have. Therefor \"items\" will not stay on the ground, they will disappear with the corpse. If you decide not to skin a corpse, you will not get it\'s skin, and it will disappear.

As for doing useless art images, that idea has already been banned from the PlaneShift servers as it caused lag and caused people to get disconnected, so don\'t you worry about that in the future.

Oh, and as far as what I know, there won\'t be any \"hunting areas\" such as in AC or RS or whatever games you\'ve played before. PlaneShift\'s world is -BIG- thus giving the developers LOTS of space to put monsters on. I\'m not talking about walking days and weeks to find anything at all, but it most likely wont be crowded unless you pay a visit to a monster nest. Which would be stupid, by the way.

The kind of thing I was talking about is if you put some of your items somewhere, like in a cave you only know about, they wouldn\'t disappear at all. Of course you would ask why anyone would do such a stupid thing, then I\'d simply say \"because of that big dragon blocking the entrance\". That means noone besides you will be able to get those items (or even bother trying) and they will be safe.

Now you think \"damn stupid person not just put bank stuffz\" then I\'d say \"stop drooling over the game mechanics and start playing the game as an RPG instead of a PPG\". Thank you, and have a nice day.

[Arberar]

if your weapon will degrade you should be able to at least try and fix it if you created a nice weapon as a blacksmith and you use it for some time and it breaks and you can never use it anymore... i think you\'ll be a little disapointed like make it repearable and if that fails you lose it it could depend on the skill you have on weapon making.

it would be handy cause you will have to go other players to repair your weapons if you don\'t have enough skills and that would improve roleplaying a bit to

[Taldor]

How can a weapon break if you try to sharp(i hope it\'s spelled this way, I mean \'make sharper\') you weapon? Ok it is possible you can\'t make it sharper but breaking?...

The mistakes I don\'t want to see repeated are:
- The use of only integer numbers (going from (skil)level 1 to  2 an sometimes make an enourmous diffrence).
- Magic effects that give you a bonus for a while and then suddenly dissapear (It\'s very unnatural).
- The third thing I wouLdn\'t like to see are static numers: i.e. all ennemies of the same type have exactly the same hp, strength, ...; static npc shop prizes; fall damage only calculated on height (jump down twice from the same height, and you\'ll understand); ....