Posts made by Darian

Regarding the meaningless of bounties in a system with re-spawn, perhaps it would work if bounties are connected to crimes and they are just the means to bring someone before justice. I'm talking about a system where you get payed for capturing the offender, but then, the offender will be fined a whole lot more for his crimes. This way we avoid the exploit with having a friend collect your bounty. since you really don't want to get caught. Let's say the bounty could be 10% of the fine. The more crimes you commit, the bigger the fine. If you can't afford to pay the fine when caught you could be "sold into slavery" and automatically begin a quest where you are locked into a mine and can only get out once you have delivered a certain amount of gathered materials to the guards. Could be cool... may also add some escape options that are incredibly hard to pull off and would double your sentence should you fail... There are options to make the game fun and immersive while allowing crime to happen without making the game a grieve festival.

@evolgrinz yup... now that you put it in our faces, re-spawn kind of makes bounties meaningless.

As far as i'm concerned, a game/story without drama is bland, dull, (please insert a plethora of uninteresting adjectives here). Most theme park games solve this issue with villains. In a sandbox, some players must role play and create the drama themselves. Become the villains! Otherwise, the game will die off quite fast. In order to have villain players, they MUST have instruments at their disposal to do so. Without such instruments, their efforts will be meaningless. The beastmen will afk farm forever. PvP-ers will dash it out in "arena worlds" until everyone gets bored. So i say... sure have bounties, and have 'em impact your alignment. Have all sorts of crimes and have them impact your alignment as well. Have earning good alignment be really hard and require consistence... while a single crime turn you to slight evil in an instance as t is in the real world. Have the world react to it. Have players organize militia to protect themselves from grievers. It's easy to spot them... they are evil aligned.
As far as fool loot and ganging gatherers is concerned, i'd solve this by having the gathered materials be carried by very slow carts, not in personal inventories. Stealing them would instantly mark you as evil aligned so any guards or other players that see you, know you stole those goods and can kill you and bring those goods to the town guards for a reward. The owner can subsequently get the goods from there, minus the reward. This would leave the griever with an option to risk a really long and perilous journey to the stargate, and then to a planet where he can actually put the stolen goods to use, thus greatly discouraging the grievers everyone complains. Still some people might take the role of the villain and challenge everyone else to interesting adventures.

@finland Even if there are low increments, higher lvl skills will give an edge. It's the same for better gear (crafted with better materials, by a much more skilled craftsman). There WILL, therefore be a straight forward power difference between a new player and a veteran. If you factor in the fact that the veteran has more experience with the gameplay, and the "feel" of his kit as well as how his opponent's kit performs, we have quite the power gap between the two. I'm not saying this is bad. It's in fact good. There needs to be some form of progression... still, stating that there will be no power difference between players as a justification for something you want or don't want in the game is... well... sophistic to say the least.

@vesterouge from an immersion perspective, atheist (meaning does not believe gods exist) is quite dumb in a world where gods manifest themselves. On the other hand, you could have neutral players who choose not to worship any gods. Perhaps this will grant them the opportunity to trade with people of all religions unhindered by the quarrels among gods. As for their ability kit... they could simply choose to fill their bar with skills that are not related to a certain god.

Hurrraaaay! Thank you! Congratulations everyone!

@kairosval Marvelous little gimmick... have it difficult to achieve... aka getting massive Favor with Babilis, and perhaps completing a really difficult challenge for him would reward you with the ability to summon the 1 daemon but you would need to pay a heavy price... I think gold, other vanity/ or perhaps sacrifice the hearts of defeated PCs. This way you can't really abuse the ability and you're also most certainly evil aligned and considered a criminal throughout Syndesia. Also, the summoning ritual should also involve negotiating with the daemon, Meaning that you can't just summon him on the fly, in the middle of combat. I'd also add a 50% dedicated manna cost for keeping the planar link that allows the Daemon to stay on Syndesia, meaning that while he benefits from the support of another player, the summoner only has half a manna pool for his own spell casting.

@jetah Looks like EvolGrinZ, just answered your question. Another exploit is the ability to trade illegal items with no risk at all. Have someone deliver the package. Inform the receiver of the identity of the courier, have the courier get ganked on the way. Another thing is using timed bombs/disease into enemy territory since the content of the package is secret. Probably more complex exploits can be developed with the aid of a little bit of espionage. You know a rival guild will send an important package and have a "friend"/alts take the contract. Anyway, probably the most common exploit would be abusing lack of knowledge of new players and give impossible delivery times on low value objects with a slightly higher collateral or the one already mentioned.
The thing is that down voting the contractor will not really work since the player has no way of knowing he has been scammed... He'll just think he failed, and feel guilty about it. Down-voting the contractor will likely be the last thing to cross their minds. Worse, if that happens often... players will rather think the game and it's community are bad, with gankers who just wait in choke points and attack everyone for no apparent reason.

Ah... Contracts... A lawyer's favorite subject. Technically, you can't truly have a player driven economy without contracts! But then... contracts are incredibly shady and infinite in diversity. Left unchecked they will bring tons of exploitation while checking them is titanic work. Waking this road can make or brake a game. Succeeding though, makes it legendary! I'd love to see this feature implemented, yet for every example presented in this thread I could think of at least one way to exploit it that has already happened IRL. At least IRL there are severe consequences for getting caught, but what would happen in a game environment? Who can predict... maybe a wave of vocal dissatisfaction that can put a stigma on the game, or maybe a timely solution that would bring dramatic spotlight time for the game and lure in even more players... A fine thought @EvolGrinZ . A fine thought indeed! Kudos!

Yup... I'd say bad food (either altered, poisoned or simply the lack of diversity) should cause disease, some could be just small temporary de-buffs while other could be more serious. Also, lack of proper clothing in certain environments should bring about disease. Yet nothing an alchemist couldn't help with. There could also be world events like meteor drops that bring contagious viruses to the game, crating a plague that starts a general quest to find and produce a cure, or otherwise destroy the source of the plague. Such events could bring all players, regardless of race or alignment together in a desperate search for the cure (for example, a neutral healer's committee is created, and they need a huge quantity of infected livers to be able to test and find a cure, and all players begin to hunt infected creatures to provide the guild with the necessary materials. Or they may need a large number of living test subjects and players would need to form hunting parties to catch the infected creatures alive). This shouldn't be permanent things though... just temporary events that brake the pace of the game every now and again, and also create the history of the world of Fractured.

@juan514 I like this one... give champions a global ability similar to League of Legend's Shen... so the champions get a warning signal whenever a peaceful player is attacked and they can shield him and teleport to their location to aid them in the fight. Perhaps limit the number of champions that can get there, to the number of daemons in the region the victim has been assaulted. Also refusing to respond to the call as a champion, if you are on-line, would result in loos off favor with the God. I think it would be a cool mechanic.

Yes, I always thought Gods should have more of an impact in fantasy MMOs! I mean, from, alignment bonuses and punishments as well, all the way to special challenges that once conquered grant you the right to champion in the god's name, along with some unique thematic abilities/perks only available to champions of that particular god that grow or diminish in power according to how well you actions serve your god. Also, having NPCs react to your religious alignment accordingly. There's plenty of immersion gimmicks to explore here, and plenty of fun to be had!

@knulp welcome to the Ascension!

I think this could be solved to some extent, by implementing a system that doesn't reward pvp-ers for ganking pve-rs. Fore example... you can only loot one random stack of materials, nothing more from a player that has pvp switched off while if they are attacked and they defeat their assailant, they can loot everything. Also, mark "griefers" as criminals that are attacked on sight by guards and cannot access taverns, vendors and so on in the areas where they have committed crimes. If you also have area teleportation on cooldowns, griefers will find it difficult to rest, sell out, or restock with food and the likes. This way, you don't completely shun someone off, but you make it very difficult for them to roleplay the thug!

kudos to the winners!

@jetah why wouldn't it happen. If you are playing your beastmen, crafting, or gathering or what not. And suddenly, you receive warning that a group of daemons is attacking. Would you rather carry on with whatever you where doing, only to get gank-ed a few minutes later, or join a united front for a few minutes with all the other beastmen that are on-line at the time, fend off the attack, and than go back to your farming in safety?

@fibs Fair point. I think I was clear that gaming environment is different from reality. Still we have games like tiger knight for example, where parts of the actual mechanics of different weapons have been implemented. They still struggle with balance though. Since they are aiming for realism, but how can you balance something that is realistically superior while keeping the "feel" of the weapon close to what it should be? I remember playing Gothic back in the days. They didn't try to balance weapons there. They just made each particularly good for certain tasks and left it to the player to prepare according to the challenge he/she was about to tackle!

I think this can easily be solved. I mean... by lore, beastmen are peaceful and they don't pvp against each other. Beastmen also have a very strong connection with nature. If daemons come to Arboreus, to hunt. The whole world should respond and there should be "signs" indicating the direction of the daemon party's whereabouts so that all beastmen can respond and rally the defense. Also, perhaps put a dimension (warp) travel limit for daemons in the sense that once a daemon has died in Arboreus, he cannot travel to Arboreus for a certain period of time. This would force the daemons to either go lone wolf and thus take large risks, or very carefully organize a short one time raid, knowing they'll face serious opposition since the party will be marked and all the creatures of Arboreum will respond aggressively.