Posts made by OlivePit

this again, all in anticipation of real news and discussion.

This thread is the record of how long people have been patiently waiting for the game while showing support and interest in it at the same time.

The point of item degradation is to have a drain on the economy to encourage and reward players to create new items.
If there is no drain then you get to your 'best' gear and just stop doing any of the content around making gear, and that kind of stagnation is not desired.

I could see it as a reward item for people who have maxed out various percentages of global mob knowledge (50%=small, 100%=big) which gives small rewards for continuing killing the maxed knowledge mobs and converts unwanted items into some amount of gold coins. This would increase the amount of gold coins in the game to fuel trading, give instant gratification for those not interested in trading their loot, increase scarcity (and thus value) of materials, and encourage exploration for more variety of mobs instead of just farming those that give you the highest coin value or relevant skills or resources.

Unfortunately I do not see it as an item that just clear cuts the whole tech tree and mining industry or bypass the current spell scaling system.

Even if you are not a member of a city you can sell your items to the city market (if there is a standing buy order) or place the items up for sale and let them be bought when you are not there by others.
Effort in, result out.
The more effort you put into the system the more result you will get out.
You dont want to put any effort into the game mechanic so you wont get much out.
There is no free lunch, and nither should there be for any aspect else every player will be complaining for their free lunch ' i dont wana have to fight mobs for loots, xp, etc... Just give me a vendor which gives it to me'..

As of the last alpha pvp mostly happened in hot spots which covered about 20% of the map, so long as you did not go afk or go alone (best with 5 friends) in those zones you were safe from pvp (mobs still could spawn / wander into you if you were afk and kill you but that's another matter)
If you were pk'ed you lost your gear. With the exception of metal plate armor or highly enchanted armor this loss was a minor setback.
There was a 'sherif' presence in the game (good pvp'ers who could only pvp evil people) but not enough population in the server as a whole for a good idea how the ballance worked. Call outs in chat letting sheriffs know of a evil pvp group resulted in the evil players running away, or the sheriffs arriving and killing em, or no effect. (attributed to low server population IMHO)
I played the vast majority of the time solo and was able to gather all materials and get to 100% knowledge on all mobs while only getting pk'ed 3 times in the 45 ish days I played. And always at known hotspots.

TLDR- it is very doable at the moment but changes in population may affect that either way.

@Farlander
Why not just encourage other players who like trading to do so by giving them your excess in exchange for a cut?
Or even better, have them be part of your guild and have the resources be divided to those who need it with excess getting traded by the players that like to do that? That way when you need a reagent or material it might be on hand as another guild mate donated it, or you just add it to the 'want' list and when the traders make their rounds to the neighboring markets, they keep an eye out for that material and get it for you.
Trading is an aspect of games that is valued and enjoyed by many players - see any truck driver simulator concept or econ trading sim-
It is simpler and healthier for the game to allow these players to have their fun and provide their support than to create whole AI systems to cut them out.
Bonus- because the markets are not linked and require physical presence to place or collect orders, and items take up limited space, there is little concern of some one manipulating the markets for their homogentisic and capitalistic ends.

token made to the lost summer alpha.

@grofire yes that is a good resource but very wide and deep, I was being more specific to concerns raised but thanks for reminding everyone of it !

https://fracturedmmo.com/feature-spotlight-2-universe-planets-travels/
"The prime way to travel to other planets, Stargates require a great deal of group effort to be summoned and don’t last for long. After crossing one, the time you’re allowed to stay on the new planet is limited and varies according to your race, your alignment and your destination. Demons are a notable exception to this rule, having been gifted by Babilis the ability to travel to other worlds more easily to bring terror to the other much hated races. However, the penalties they’ll be subject to are no smaller than those suffered by the other races… and sometimes, actually worse."

"eclipses, recurring events that have a huge impact on the lives of Demons and Humans. " -not beast men!

https://fracturedmmo.com/feature-spotlight-6-pvp-alignment-crime/
"f you flag yourself as Good, you are not allowed to perform hostile actions against any other Good or Neutral player. There are several ways this restriction is applied – some common cases being:

You can’t use basic attacks and targeted spells against Good or Neutral players.
Your AOE abilities cause no damage or negative side effects to Good or Neutral players.
You can’t loot the corpse of a dead Good or Neutral player.
Giving the killing blow to a knocked-out Good or Neutral player is not possible.
You can’t take possession of bounty that doesn’t belong to you.
On the contrary, all the hostile actions listed above are permitted against Evil players – and even encouraged by Karma gains!

Since all Beastmen have a default Good alignment that can’t be changed on Arboreus, it is literally impossible for them to hurt each other. This also lessens the need for them to form a Party, making grouping easier.

As a Good player, you’re sure to inspire confidence to everyone you meet."

"Arboreus is designed to be the ideal home of PvE lovers. It features large areas accessible only by Beastmen and characters with Good alignment, and a great degree of protection from hostile PvP in the rest of the world. How great is such protection? Let’s go through that together.

First and foremost, travelling to Arboreus is no small feat for a Human or Demon character. It requires good planning and is generally expected to be a group effort. Moreover, and more importantly, things get exponentially more difficult for players of Neutral and Evil alignment, who not only have to work harder to gain access to the planet, but also find it harder to stay.

Indeed, only Humans with Good alignment are allowed to walk the lands of Arboreus for a considerable amount of time – 20/40 real-world hours, thus being able to explore a good portion of the world at once, collecting resources and acquiring knowledge.

If you’re a Human with Neutral alignment, you can also stay for a while – around 5/10 hours, penalized only by a slight stat debuff. However, if you get flagged as Aggressive, you are immediately treated as Evil, suffering all the penalties explained below.

If your character has an Evil alignment and you manage to enter Arboreus, well, now you’re in trouble! The planet itself, pervaded by the primal energy of Elysium, immediately starts fighting to repel you. You become heavily debuffed, and normally pacific creatures turn aggressive against you, seeking you out to rip you apart. Even worse, you are only allowed to stay on Arboreus for half an hour at once, and you are quickly drained of all vital energies if you step into a Good-only area.

TL;DR

If you play as a Beastman on Arboreus, you’ll often wander zones completely devoid of hostile PvP – particularly as a new player, and you’re unlikely to be the victim of an aggression from other races in the rest of the world as well. If you’re Evil and looking to travel to Arboreus to go on a killing spree, you won’t succeed – you’d rather have a clear PvE / gathering objective in mind and complete it as fast as you can!"

Thank you to the devs and simple news system which made looking up these quotes so easy and quick for me to do.
Read more of the news posts to get a better idea of what they are aiming for instead of making assumptions.

@Farlander
The devs have said that demons could visit other worlds but also said that the cost to do so would be high and that the further from their natural environment they go (evil > neutral>good) the higher the penalties they would have in any pvp they choose to engage in. A demon visiting the animal planet would be like a shark discovering they are chum, they would have to be very careful to avoid any detection or suffer... and they could only even be there for a matter of minutes before being rubberbanded back to Tartarus.

@r6G4596Y7G9AwD0TzJTxFSZx
As of this past spring alpha you can achieve 100% mob knowledge and even clear easy to mid bosses totally without pvp and solo (with moderate effort and tweaking of builds). There was even one or two players that set out to solo some of the hard bosses.
As such it is currently totally possible to learn every skill, max out the talent tree, and equip your self with max tier equipment (with 3 T3 enchantments) without ever seeking out pvp. It will not be quick, easy, or cheep (tho the switch to imbuing may reduce the high cost of T3 enchantments through item loss).

You can even visit the other worlds (but will be at high risk while doing so).

The only thing you might be missing out on is the experience of playing the pvp world (Tartarus) character types. And even then you -could- make alts there to try it out. As a comparison I would wonder how many WoW players had characters on both the horde and alliance side and played each of the character types. I would wager that the vast majority fiddled around, found their happy place, and stuck there without worrying much about the other potential content they were choosing to not engage in.

I would be very surprised if there were many players who liked each world and character sets enough to level up each to max. Most likely people will try each of them and find their happy place and then fully enjoy that play style while maintaining the ability to make alts or visit the other worlds and experience some of that playstyle which they deemed not to their tastes.

I also maintain that the human world is not going to be one where 'unwilling victim' is going to be the standard. Even in the worst griefing phase of the last alpha I only got ganked 3 times and lost mediocre equipment which was easily replaced. It was simple for me to identify the high activity areas and avoid them when support populations (sheriffs) were not online and instead worked on farming skills and materials from the other 80% of the island and mobs which did not have pvp activity.

I suspected as much but thanks for the confirmation Prometheus !

@GamerSeuss
I could be happy with RNG -=IF=- there were some associated skill or stat or what not that you could improve to reduce poor outcomes- just like real life and other games- . However there is no such thing in the game and as such I applaud the shift away from RNG.

@Prometheus said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

@OlivePit said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

Interesting shift with alignment, but I am concerned that by restricting 'lawful' cities -but no benefit- in comparison to 'lawless' cities the vast majority of the cities will just default to 'lawless' as they have nothing to loose

They have a ton to lose, Olive You can be attacked in your own city while crafting, banking, building, or just chilling... and no one will use your marketplace. We think almost no one will go lawless really.

I hope you are right, however I just do not see guilds with high population -like blue army, spider, oranthull, etc...- to see in town pvp as a potential loss but instead as a perk. As a lawless town they can use their population and activity to keep the area hostile enough that any enemies approaching or entering the city are simply brining them free resources, instead of being raiders. If they were lawfull cities then they would have no recourse to stop a good alt of a evil player from accessing their city market or other buildings, however if they are a lawless city then they can more effectively restrict and control their town and resources. I hope you are right, but it does not mesh with what I saw during the spring alpha.

@OlivePit said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

I feel this substitution removes the excellent system of hunting for enchanting reagents all over for a much more boring, and isolate, money grind.

I think you've misunderstood the post The old enchanting system has just been renamed to imbuing, with the only difference being that you need to imbue a gem first, then socket it into an item, instead of adding properties to items directly The new system to increase the power level of equipment is a replacement of the old quality system.

My mistake, allow me to clarify- The system for crafting and enchanting in the spring alpha both revolved around resource costs (enchanting reagents or equipment materials) and RNG to produce desired results. At tier 3 equipment crafting you had a 20%/80% chance of getting excellent / good equipment and at tier 4 you had a 60%/40%. this meant that at max crafting level a piece of excellent equipment that might cost 5 ingots if you were lucky, could easily cost 15 if you were not, or 8 on average as the approximate value of the piece. The proposed change calls crafting enchanting and implies that instead of this RNG system for getting excellent gear (now +4) you would instead, presumably, pay the base cost of the item, say 5 ingots, and then a nominal amount of gold coins to guarantee a excellent result. If true this shifts the valuable resource away from base materials and towards gold coins. This reduces the value of the work of miners and smelters while increasing the value of activities that generate gold coins -namely mob camping and pvp-. To get the different ores and quality fuel to alloy them a player had to travel or trade between distant parts of the map (a great feature and mechanic I feel) which was an adventure in of itself and added to the value of the resulting gear and did not negatively impact the game play of other players other than by creating potential scarcity for a few hours. If the costs had stayed resources but just lost the RNG nature then the result would be similar game play quality but with craft persons more confident in their costs and resulting product. Instead the proposed system replaces the variable RNG resource cost with a gold coin cost which shifts player activity away, some amount, away from harvesting, moving, and refining and towards mob farming and pvp for coins. An increase of incentive for pvp is something others can discuss, I am more concerned with the shift away from resource management and towards mob farming. Mobs have many values - KP, skills, imbuing reagents, crafting materials (like hides), and gold coins- I argue that the gold coin value of a mob is the least important of all these values and that this new system increases the value of the coins above that of many of the other values, which -I feel- is detrimental to the player experience. If a mob or camp is being farmed exclusively for their high gold coin drop ratio which is used to feed the new enchanting (old crafting) system, which I feel is very likely, then that makes the mob inaccessible to other players who desire to hunt the mob for the other values it provides -I am thinking of new players primarily, but imbuers (enchanters) and enchanters (craft persons) also- . Thus a system that only had to deal with competition from other miners now is forced to also compete with all the different people trying to farm mobs which greatly complicates and frustrates the once simple and satisfying process. It tells players that they cannot enjoy the game safe outside of the Mob madness.

Yes my examples use the ore and fuel resources and not the hide or cloth resources which did require some Mob hunting while ore and fuel did not. I did that for the contrast and because metal armor was by far the most prevalent and popular armor used because of its stats and -I contest- because it did not require hunting hides or silk which were more trouble and less reliable than mining because of the inclusion of the Mob competition and pvp elements. I never got attacked by players when mining ore but was attacked while getting Mob resources precisely because pvp players knew that hunting mob hunters was more beneficial than hunting miners. To hunt Mobs efficiently one needs good gear and collects valuable resources, all of which a pvp player can take. To gather ore and fuel you just need a hammer, horse, and axe; all of which are cheep and easily replaced. The only thing of value to steal is the ore which is in a wagon, slow to transport, cant be taken with you when you log off (disadvantage for pvp ers), and can be relatively easily recovered by catching up to the wagon thief.
You may think that by changing the scaling resource from the base resource to gold coins you will be making the game easier for craft persons but I contest that it will be making it harder due to increased pressures on an already very competitive Mob centric game system.
Please reconsider the ramifications of your proposed change and keep the cost of quality goods in resources, not coins.

There was also a similar (not same, just similar) for enchanting, which is now imbuing, and I have no preconceptions about that and look forward to it.

@Tajger
I, for one, greatly appreciated the previous enchanting system which you created a wonderful tool for.
I believe that this proposed system will be not as interactive, interesting, or rewarding.
As such I think you should not loose hope or scrap your great tool.

This is alpha, things swing widely back and fourth before finally settling.

I think your tool and the enchanting reagents system will come back into favor.

Thanks for the update Prometheus !
I understand the delay but am disappointed if just because I believe that there will be less potential activity in the fall than the summer -I for one will have less time to test in the fall-.

Interesting shift with alignment, but I am concerned that by restricting 'lawful' cities -but no benefit- in comparison to 'lawless' cities the vast majority of the cities will just default to 'lawless' as they have nothing to loose, just like how most the active guilds went 'evil' as there was no real penalty. There should be a disadvantage to making a city 'lawless' or advantage to making a city 'lawful' otherwise the server will go 'evil and lawless' for near the same reasons alpha was mostly 'evil' - it's just more convienent.

All the kudos for the pve expansion and move away from camped static locations and towards dynamic events.

I heartily approve of the linear scaling cost of higher quality equipment instead of the 'try your luck' approach.

The use of coins and not raw materials for the higher tiers is slightly confusing but I suppose that if you really want to make coins more valuable that is a way to do it...
It does have the potential of reducing player interactions (traveling, trading, harvesting, raiding) for specific resources only found in different areas of the map with players instead just gold coin farming zones near their 'base town'. Why go to the far end of the map to trade or hunt for, say, ectoplasm, when you can just use coins gotten near your home by the vale for better equipment?
I feel this substitution removes the excellent system of hunting for enchanting reagents all over for a much more boring, and isolate, money grind.

I look forward to the alpha and seeing what works and what does not and hope there will be some more info on changes to the city mechanics and tech tree.

Can you be more specific as to what your playstyle is?

I can say that the guild I ran with -Meridian- did not rush content, or pressure members to do anything they were not interested in doing, while at the same time giving them the support that they wanted.
I spent days just harvesting resources and farming crops with no pressures to be 'more optimized' and during that time never got harassed by any other group or individual at all. Meridian also welcomed many small groups of 2-5 players who wanted to try out the town experiences but without guild drama. They got access to the content they wanted and enjoyed playing at their own pace within their own groups and when they had done 'enough', left. Meanwhile they got to have the support of the guild should they feel the need for it (and other than lending some starting money and helping collecting stone they did not feel they needed any other help).

It seemed to me that the 'toxic' activity was restricted to three areas on the map which could easily be avoided while still being able to progress should you not be able to get a group or be sneaky enough to avoid unwanted attention.

When there was the rampant pvp and roaming ganking groups I did die and get looted three times.
This was not a significant setback as the guild had sufficient resources to re-equip me had I chose that option. I did not and each time simply went to a different part of the map to harvest mobs where the gankers were not present -or- asked for others to join me in the mob harvesting and went in security and was able to recover my gear in short order.

In addition there were significant sheriff forces out who would quickly go to where griefing had occurred to beat and imprison the evil players - as part of the game mechanics- and I was not griefed in the same place in succession due to this activity (when I did decide to go back immediately).

The city of Sproketon is a great case in point. Many individuals and small groups who were irritated by the pvp and ganking around the vale of shadows decided to go to the other side of the island, make a city, and farm the unique mobs there. They quickly gained individual followers and ranked up to a lvl 13 city providing just about all the comforts necessary for individual progression. To my knowledge the people of this city did not have any trouble from gankers, griefers, or pvp enthusiasts as they were distant enough from the 'activity center' of the map (goblin hills, big forest, shadow vale) that the toxic players just did not take the time to travel there (yay slow travel game).

I am sorry to hear you did not get the gaming experience that I, or my other guild mates, had but can assure you that my story is not unique or unusual and believe that if you were to be specific about what you are looking for in the game and what you want to do that you would be able to find a group that would support your playstyle.

Why the call out to me? I am confused. Also finding me in game is easy as I regularly announce where i'm doing trades (and for which town) so why make it into a challange?

Trying out old complex mods for minecraft.