Rot time again

Feedback, bugs, and general gameplay related discussion.
Latreg
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Rot time again

Postby Latreg » Mon May 16, 2005 8:29 pm

let's examine some situations that may keep people from playing or cut down on the time hey do play. I for one do not do anything about an hour before I need to log. Consider this 8 hours of sleep, getting ready for bed, then getting ready for work in the morning 1 hour, travel to and from 1 hour, work 8 hours 1/2 for lunch. total 18 1/2 hours, rot time of an unlooted corpse 18 hours. Why have a rot time on geared corpses? I'm sure there are hundreds of examples.
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Postby kiryan » Mon May 16, 2005 8:52 pm

what is the point of rot timers if gods are just going to press or drag corpses?

im not complaining really... but the inconsistent dynamics of the whole thing just don't make any sense to me.

personally, id vote for no rot timer on > level 35 corpses and move < 35 to 72 hours. also, id fix corpses so scrying or spirit walking them didnt reset the rot timer to 2 hours, just make it so that scry/spirit walk doesnt work on a corpse older than 2 hours.
teflor the ranger
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Postby teflor the ranger » Mon May 16, 2005 9:08 pm

What is ironic is that I have a corpse full of eq rotting somewhere in a new zone which also has a bag full of someone else's eq that rotted.

*snicker*
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Postby moritheil » Mon May 16, 2005 11:52 pm

I have an answer for this, but you're not going to like it.

The phrasing of your question implies that Toril mudding is something that can and should be planned. The idea is that, like normal gaming, it can be kept in a neat box.

Toril did not get where it is today by allowing itself to be put in a box. Toril is meant to addict you. The classic response when you die is to throw your entire schedule out of whack by going on an emergency CR.

While I am not unsympathetic to your needs, having gone overtime at just about every hour of the day trying to CR at some point in time, my question to you is this: would the need to CR be as urgent if you knew you could just get your stuff back anytime? Heck, if you don't need to take care of it now, why have it mess up your mood tomorrow night? How about you wait for the weekend? Or for that matter, how about you just wait and come back a few months later when you feel like it?

I would support a decision that helped people use their time better, if it didn't seem to be taking away from the compulsion for them to play.
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Latreg
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Postby Latreg » Tue May 17, 2005 12:53 am

Mori I understand your point of view even though I tend to disagree. I think more often than not people who are stuck with a major cr (at least for them) and have their corpse rot would tend to play something else. Many others probably do what I do, don't get involved in anything that you can't finish. I turn down lots of stuff (more in the past than present) because I may get caught up in a long cr work > mud no money no internet ;)

there's a few people who have found gear, another person found stuff in vt, no one has claimed either yet, why? cause they probably got pissed off and quit.
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Postby kiryan » Tue May 17, 2005 3:51 am

I thought a certain feature of FFXI was very friendly to busy schedules and part time players.

When you died you could opt to sit there and wait for a ress (up to 45 minutes) or you could "return" to your hometown with all your eq but lose all possib.

i know we wont go that route, however, I thought it was a great feature because you could always return home (didnt have to worry so much when exploring) and you never had to be up an extra 2 hours to CR.

In a recent CR, we died at about 11:00 pm PST (2am EST). I had to drive out to AZ since it was our anniversary (6.5 hours) get a couple hours of sleep then try and CR before the corpse rot thing happened at 16-18 hours. I really would've preferred not having to get up and mud on 2-3 hours of sleep however I wasnt about to let all my eq rot. So I push myself the extra mile, log in and find out the gods pressed all the corpses.

I mean that was really nice and im trying not to complain, but if were gonna just press all the corpses for us whenever we get into a pinch, why even let them rot in the first place?
Last edited by kiryan on Tue May 17, 2005 3:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
Corth
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Postby Corth » Tue May 17, 2005 3:58 am

Kind of agree with Morithiel. When I was playing a lot earlier this wipe I really missed the 'emergency' cr's. That and the fact that rogues make cr's so easy now kind of take something away from the game. Oh well.

Corth
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Postby Latreg » Tue May 17, 2005 11:30 am

Corth wrote:Kind of agree with Morithiel. When I was playing a lot earlier this wipe I really missed the 'emergency' cr's. That and the fact that rogues make cr's so easy now kind of take something away from the game. Oh well.

Corth


I was more focusing on the midlevel explorer, someone new to the mud who was given gear and tries to explore. Doesn't know many people or is afraid to ask for help or people out zoning and can't help.

So I guess the real issuse isn't loss of exp but loss of gear. Kiryan had some excellent ideas.
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Postby Areandon » Tue May 17, 2005 1:53 pm

Well what if you adjust Kiryan's idea a bit? Give people the option to either CR or return to their hometown with all their stuff and automatically lose one more more levels? It would still be a big penalty but not so bad. I would seriously consider simply quitting if I'd lose years worth of eq, but a few weeks experience i could overcome.

Most players of this mud have changed and I think the game should change with them.
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Postby Kifle » Tue May 17, 2005 3:42 pm

Corth wrote:Kind of agree with Morithiel. When I was playing a lot earlier this wipe I really missed the 'emergency' cr's. That and the fact that rogues make cr's so easy now kind of take something away from the game. Oh well.

Corth


Agree. However, I think over the years the MUD has gone from unnecessary time consuming activities (i.e. emergency CR's, long res fatigue) to a more "stick to the meat of the game" attitude. The bad part is that while it's making the transition to allow more zoning and what-not, it has kept the archaic annoyances such as corpse rot that aren't necessary to it's current incarnation.

Ironically, while this idea of corpse rot has stayed, like Kiryan pointed out, the gods will negate most negative outcomes by pressing corpses, refunding lost items, and transportation. The reason is most probably that they understand that if a high level character loses their hard earned equipment, they will have a high probability of quiting -- so they have their hands tied.

It would be nice to return to the old Toril of losing your eq, having to have a back-up CR set of gear, etc., but it isn't going to happen. If this aspect of the game will be circumvented by the gods sometimes, it will only imply favoritism which will further lead some into a sense of disatisfaction. The only logical course would be to either remove corpse rot or stoping helping with cr's and rotting corpses. I don't see either happening though.
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Postby moritheil » Wed May 18, 2005 6:29 am

Latreg wrote:there's a few people who have found gear, another person found stuff in vt, no one has claimed either yet, why? cause they probably got pissed off and quit.


This is a very good point. I actually wonder what the statistics would show.

And Kifle, I think most players tend to have a CR kit at this point, if only because they have spare gear to make it.
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Postby kiryan » Wed May 18, 2005 5:45 pm

i think changes driven by fear of losing additional players is not a good path to be on.

Pick a direction for the mud and bring the three spheres inline with it. More towards lost eq or more away from lost eq.

away from lost eq:
ubiquitousness of prot fire/cold/acid eq
original +time to corpse rot
zap to inventory
gods pressing corpses
gods reimbing keys
change to rhemo swallow proc to leave corpse
removing the beholder disint proc

towards lost eq:
rust monsters
dragons loading all over the place, anyone remember when dragons were actually somewhat rare?

I think its pretty clear what path we are on, and I hope we continue to move in that direciton. I personally prefer not to lose any eq, and I prefer not having to go to extraordinary efforts to CR within 16 hours.

I could've driven off the road and gotten killed trying to CR the last spank I was involved in; theres one way to lose a player permanently. Sure it wouldnt be the muds fault, I coudlve choosen to miss my anniversary because i was mudding or I couldve just hoped someone else would take care of it, but the dynamics of the game + real life compelled me to choose a risky option... Do you think this is healthy for our players?

How many classes have been failed, how many people got fired cuz of mudding? I know one guy who got a .5 gpa on 12 credits laregly because he was addicted to sojourn. I know a couple more who failed several classes and I got much worse grades than I would've had I not played. I knew a guy who regularly called in sick cuz he was up all hours of nite on toril, course he did this for other games too. If the game encourages/forces people to choose mud over RL and they subsequently experience RL failures, your not going to have a healthy pbase over time. They are going to get fired, lose their internet connections or simply give up the game because they can't discipline themselves.
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Postby Delmair Aamoren » Wed May 18, 2005 7:06 pm

I agree with kiryan, to an extent. I like having to do the emergency CR's, but
when you spank at a time of the day when there isn't hope of another group
coming and saving your ass for any time in the near future, and its
something a naked party can't do, yer hosed. This is where the rogue and
illusionist ability to stay hidden and sneak around comes in quite handy.
Can't think of a good way to balance this, but that is life i suppose.
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Postby avak » Wed May 18, 2005 10:12 pm

How many classes have been failed, how many people got fired cuz of mudding? I know one guy who got a .5 gpa on 12 credits laregly because he was addicted to sojourn. I know a couple more who failed several classes and I got much worse grades than I would've had I not played. I knew a guy who regularly called in sick cuz he was up all hours of nite on toril, course he did this for other games too. If the game encourages/forces people to choose mud over RL and they subsequently experience RL failures, your not going to have a healthy pbase over time. They are going to get fired, lose their internet connections or simply give up the game because they can't discipline themselves.


That seems like a really slippery slope to me. I think that the players need to be personally responsible for their actions outside of the mud. I would agree that RL should at least be a consideration, but with the CR situation the way it is currently how often do people really need to choose the mud over RL? I guess I would say that you should be experienced enough to know that a certain zone or activity has the potential for a massive spank and not partake if you have some really important RL commitment.

As for rot time, it should be consistent. Gods should probably avoid getting involved because that will generally be inconsistent over the long term. Rot time should be 18 hours no matter what, with a press spell adding to that. The idea that scrying or looting somehow affects that rot time is inconsistent.

I do really like Kiryan's idea of being able to sacrifice a certain amount of exp in exchange for your eq. It could be problematic at higher levels where losing exp is bordering on meaningless, but I still think it has a lot of merit.
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Postby kiryan » Wed May 18, 2005 11:04 pm

its not my idea, final fantasy XI allows you to sacrifice the possibility of exp recovery for transport to hometown with eq.

While I agree it is a slippery slope, how is it a bad thing to take into account your target audiences habits when designing your game? Games like FFXI and WoW cater to both the power gamer and the part time gamer with features.

WoW has the "rest" stat which allows you to do accelerated exp for the first few hours you log on every day. So while you can power game to high level, you can also get there more efficiently with a few hours a day. You know if people exp'd more efficiently in spurts every few hours, they might have more incentive to explore or quest.

Other games cater to part time players by creating things like tradeskills that require insane time and money investments to excel at but individual parts can be done in short periods of time like 15 minutes a day. Final Fantasy has "gardening" where you have to tend your garden every day or your plants die...

What can you do in this game if you only have 1 hour a day? No zone group assembles smites and returns faster than 1 hour, it just doesnt happen. You might be able to do 15% exp if you can find willing people... If theres no reboot, not much "questing" you can do. If you go exploring and get smited, your gonna go over 1 hour time limit.
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Postby Sarell » Thu May 19, 2005 7:32 am

"It would be nice to return to the old Toril of losing your eq, having to have a back-up CR set of gear, etc., but it isn't going to happen." Kifle


Egads, no it wouldn't...specially cos now you have quests that take a year on completion instead of a week to be considered big!
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Postby Demuladon » Thu May 19, 2005 8:36 am

Kiryan wrote:
WoW has the "rest" stat which allows you to do accelerated exp for the first few hours you log on every day. So while you can power game to high level, you can also get there more efficiently with a few hours a day. You know if people exp'd more efficiently in spurts every few hours, they might have more incentive to explore or quest.


I know nothing about WoW.. however this idea is *really* good.

How much faster is the accelerated xp in the first few hours?

2x? 3x?
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Postby kiryan » Thu May 19, 2005 5:32 pm

whats good about it.

if you don't have time to exp toril style, 3-6 hours at at time a couple times a week you don't really have time to zone. If you can't zone whats the point of leveling a character?
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Postby Arilin Nydelahar » Thu May 19, 2005 6:03 pm

kiryan wrote:If you can't zone whats the point of leveling a character?


Habit, and boredom.
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Postby fotex » Sun May 22, 2005 3:34 am

kiryan wrote:If you can't zone whats the point of leveling a character?


Artificial sense of achievement?
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Postby Raiwen » Sun May 22, 2005 10:51 pm

kiryan wrote:if you don't have time to exp toril style, 3-6 hours at at time a couple times a week you don't really have time to zone. If you can't zone whats the point of leveling a character?

This is the root of the problem.

This mud needs more things to do besides zoning - as there are lots and lots of players out there that can only play for an hour or so a day. I figure that once a week, they could probably play for a good deal longer, however, most of the time they can't. It's this type of player that could really boost our numbers.

If you build it they will come. Once they are here, the game can addict them - but the hard part is keeping them interested enough to keep coming back.
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Postby Thilindel » Sun May 22, 2005 11:03 pm

kiryan wrote:its not my idea, final fantasy XI allows you to sacrifice the possibility of exp recovery for transport to hometown with eq.


Diablo too. I really like having that as a last resort. Sometimes, you're just f*cked and with the random hit/miss in player base, there are times you REALLY need to just quit/exit to get corpse back.

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