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Post by anaiahlation on Jan 6, 2020 19:02:54 GMT -5
Not particularly important or necessarily relevant to anyone but I am not a fan of consumables degrading, like spice and food. Weapons and armor? Definitely, if it works like tools, like with use. It's the timer on the degrading of consumables that makes me dislike it so.
Between those and the Brew changes, I believe that encapsulates the lion's share of why I stopped really even playing. I mean, I have made periodic characters and just been do apathetic about the experience and what it will be that I will log in, get them set up in starter gear, and just... Be done. By the time I even consider logging in again, they've already had a birthday. So I either suicide or put in to store them, intending to play a new character idea... And the exact goddamn thing happens, this has been like 2-3 years now. Maybe one of them will stick again at some point.
Ennui.
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Post by sirra on Jan 6, 2020 19:22:49 GMT -5
Not particularly important or necessarily relevant to anyone but I am not a fan of consumables degrading, like spice and food. Weapons and armor? Definitely, if it works like tools, like with use. It's the timer on the degrading of consumables that makes me dislike it so. Between those and the Brew changes, I believe that encapsulates the lion's share of why I stopped really even playing. I mean, I have made periodic characters and just been do apathetic about the experience and what it will be that I will log in, get them set up in starter gear, and just... Be done. By the time I even consider logging in again, they've already had a birthday. So I either suicide or put in to store them, intending to play a new character idea... And the exact goddamn thing happens, this has been like 2-3 years now. Maybe one of them will stick again at some point. Ennui. At some point, they decided to make the survival part of the game a pain in the ass for anyone who didn't belong to a clan where you could get an unlimited amount of free steak and water. I'm not sure *why* they did that. But they did. I always thought it would've been better if animals gave a bit more meat from being skinned, that meat could be preserved better, and that clans would have to pay people to go hunt for them. Or (lacking a PC hunter employee) use their stipend to go down to the well or to the grocery in town, and buy food/water there. I thought it would've hit a lot of birds with the same stone. Helped the economy immensely, and also gave a badly needed sid sink. Having unlimited free food, water and storage is how every decent Salarr hunter or Kurac merc soon became stupid rich.
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vex
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Post by vex on Jan 7, 2020 2:34:30 GMT -5
Food is such a non-issue, for everyone, that it could stand to have its decay rate increased substantially. I'd start at 4-6x, and consider as much as 10x the current, just so PCs having a regular 'go to' person to supply them with food, is one more avenue for generalist pcs to make contacts and be relevant. Being the food guy isn't very impressive sounding, but only because you can give a hunter 50 coins for 20 slabs of tandu, and store it in a chest next to your armor for a RL week with zero consequences. If you really did need to source food, be it from a vendor (for big $$$) or a PC (for pocket change), it would lead to lots more reasons, for people to want a few good, reliable hunters around.
Were it not for skinned items 'sinking into the ground' MMO style, without player interaction, there would be piles of meat left everywhere, due to it holding zero value. The world postures as if famine were a constant fear of most of the worlds population, but for PCs, food... has no value, nor will most people even opt for 'great food' when 'jerky' is available, because they'd rather have 50,000 coins in the bank, than RP enjoying a delicious (and thematically, rare and precious) slice of pie with a friend.
Spice, on the other hand, is already such a mismanaged thing, that adding decay on top of the 'three clan spice chain' for smuggling it into Allanak, the only place where spice is going to matter as a plot device, is completely crippling an already maimed horse. It's already unused, and undesirable, so much so that nobody in Allanak wants to even be associated with it. It's all con, with no benefit. You can RP drinking booze, with absolutely no concern for random AoD people killing you in the Gaj for possessing it, for all your debauched needs.
Spice needs to have lasting benefits (stat bumps), with lasting consequences (stat negs) if it isn't used on a regular basis. The 'consequence' shouldn't stack, as it does now, else you end up in a situation where your pc is just a walking corpse, waiting for you to go afk when it all starts wearing off. It shouldn't decay, and shouldn't give you away with an obvious SMELLS LIKE THIS SPECIFIC SPICE odor, unless it's been used VERY recently, to the tune, of 5-10 rl minutes, else AGAIN, garbage AoD players will randomly gank you for smelling like you used spice.
As a counter to not smelling like a spice den for literally rl hours after rping a round with the hookah, maybe make rooms spice are used in, have a 'smoky haze' indicative of the spice smoked, appear in the room for some time, or give furniture a 'smoky' sdesc addon that needs to be removed with soap, or something. It'd make going up to the roof for a smoke a lot more reasonable, than huffing it in secret at your pad, with no fear, until you leave the room SMELLING LIKE A TARGET. It'd also make being in a spice fiends dive, a lot more thematic: Gross.
Make sniff echo to the entire room, so if you're going around sniffing people, you look suitably, like the creep you are. Its too weird that it doesn't echo, imo.
Tbh, they need to... really, dismantle the dependence chain of the spice clans, or at least how they're supposed to work, because there are not enough players to facilitate it. That one clan could be closed entirely, and just leave it a kurac/guild dynamic, and nothing would be lost. It'd be no less clunky, but it'd at least have a shot at working as intended, probably.
I do agree also, that clans should be responsible for their own food, with the exception of nobles. Free food for nobles via npcs, and free water for the clan is sufficient. Getting a hunter hired to supply food, is EXACTLY the kind of work a noble should be dumping on an Aide, to give their job some relevance. An aide who does nothing but idle in reds, hoping for someone to log in and rp with them, is a shitty role for anyone, really.
Food in general needs to be more valuable and desirable, because for the theme, it should be important, not something you derisively leave behind in a huff, because you didn't get the only thing that mattered to pcs: the hide.
Water could stand to be more valuable, too. Like a lot of those free water holes, only being accessible at master forage, or something like that. Or just disappearing entirely.
Make vendor water 2-3x more expensive, so, once again, knowing a good, worldly hunter, means getting water from a pc that much more economical, and clans that much more appealing.
And then, your local water witches, will have a little more interactions, too.
Driving players together, and forcing situations wherein they must interact and cooperate, even if they don't like each other, can only lead to something better, than we have atm. We can't have that, until NPCs and too-generous mechanics, let people effectively be 100% solo viable, no matter the class.
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grumble
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Post by grumble on Jan 19, 2020 14:55:42 GMT -5
I don't agree. Making people even more reliant on others when there are playtimes dead zones would be an error of catastrophic proportions. I don't like spice decay. Food decays rather rapidly. Water holes are pretty important, but if you play a city-bound role then you won't be using them.
I mean, if it works for you to have food be scarce then RP accordingly, junk food as you think it goes bad, hell, water the plants if you want to. I once had a very good relationship to the land as a mundane because each plant I picked bits off of, my elf would water it to make for a fair trade.
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vex
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Post by vex on Jan 19, 2020 15:27:47 GMT -5
In a game billed to be harsh and unforgiving, you and a lot of others, seem to want an awfully soft game.
Really, if we're all expected to be junking food and pouring out our water, or burying our coins and forgetting where we left them, so we can PRETEND to rough it, I don't know why we even bother trying in the first place.
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grumble
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Post by grumble on Jan 19, 2020 16:09:50 GMT -5
Well, you're free to do that if you want to. I typically spend coin on all sorts of things I don't "need", I'd hate to "need" to spend more on those. Be the change and all that.
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grumble
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Post by grumble on Jan 19, 2020 16:12:27 GMT -5
I suppose the point is it's only a matter of time before someone wants poison cures to degrade. Which might seem great, if you've never been poisoned before IG. I still don't know how the new cures work or what cures what, I had the old cures memorized. The problem is one prick of poison is certainly enough to kill you unless you have a solid chunk of endurance, and coordinating with players to get the cures you need is, at best, cumbersome. Not to mention some players are on the other side of the world so their playtimes are like, early/late morning by EST.
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vex
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Post by vex on Jan 19, 2020 16:49:42 GMT -5
Well, you're free to do that if you want to. I typically spend coin on all sorts of things I don't "need", I'd hate to "need" to spend more on those. Be the change and all that. That kind of response would be great, on the GDB. Here, it's bullshit.
I suppose the point is it's only a matter of time before someone wants poison cures to degrade. Which might seem great, if you've never been poisoned before IG. I still don't know how the new cures work or what cures what, I had the old cures memorized. The problem is one prick of poison is certainly enough to kill you unless you have a solid chunk of endurance, and coordinating with players to get the cures you need is, at best, cumbersome. Not to mention some players are on the other side of the world so their playtimes are like, early/late morning by EST.
100% fine with poison cures degrading, too. A consuming player, is a hungry player, is a motivated player, something almost every PC in Arm lacks right now.
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grumble
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Post by grumble on Jan 21, 2020 20:53:40 GMT -5
Vex, I find it difficult to come up with a counter-argument. Honestly, if I hadn't had much experience with being poisoned I would think it was a good idea, but there are mobs with scripts to auto-poison you at random, though Kryl, in my experience, are easier to kill than tarantualas.
In the event of assassins, some of them send warning with a poison dart or stab, if your cure is degraded you will die, this is assuming you even have one in the first place. Some people die even from the warning. If an assassin really wants you dead they will make sure you stay still while you die. I see little benefit from cure degredation, if no one buys cures it might just be because it costs too damn much.
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vex
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Post by vex on Jan 22, 2020 2:00:29 GMT -5
If someone uses usually fatal poison, as their warning shot, they're not very good at their job. That's not how warning shots work, at all.
Poison should be dangerous/deadly. You should be fearful, about engaging with PCs/NPCs, that can use poison against you. That's how poison should be.
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grumble
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Post by grumble on Jan 22, 2020 21:20:58 GMT -5
Bloodburn is typically easy to cure, provided you can find the cure before your HP runs out, if you don't have one this means running around begging and/or bribing whoever you can find. It's sort of a warning, sort of a prank. It's one of the easiest poisons to acquire. Skellebain makes a better prank imo.
There's also the risk of someone dropping a keg of cleaning fluid at an IC celebration involving kegs on the floor (this has happened to me, many PCs laughed because I was playing an elf but luckilly I had few sets of cures). There's shitmugging, but that's fallen out of fashion.
But as far as wildlife is concerned there's Kryl that people will unwittingly lure out of the grey who will park up by the north road. They tend to get stuck there, and will attack people who haven't gone into the grey who are simply trying to run errands, and they can have a wide variety of poisons, from blindness poisons to straight up rage poisons which, if you survive the fight with a club-tail you may be fighting your mount next. As far as I know there are no cures for these, so they're still scary even if you have the cures for minor poisons. Cure degredation would make these slightly scarier, but it would mostly impact newbs trying to log near morin's running into a cilops, who will dose you with bloodburn, which can be fatal if untreated or not shrugged off.
Cures are already difficult enough to manage and coordinate without degredation (or maybe they have degredation now, I haven't been paying attention lately), and the services of a skilled apothacary will always be in high demand, so if that's the concern I'm unsure it should be. I remember what a pain in the ass it was to be one of the primary cure/bandage crafters in the Byn and spam-crafting these things into oblivion so our units would be properly equipped. It involved sitting at a bench and having to avoid other duties on orders of the Sergeant.
As far as degredation of spice, I'm unsure how adding another downside to an RP prop that is already completely full of coded downsides is a good idea, but ymmv.
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vex
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Post by vex on Jan 23, 2020 1:55:16 GMT -5
Bloodburn is typically easy to cure, provided you can find the cure before your HP runs out, if you don't have one this means running around begging and/or bribing whoever you can find. It's sort of a warning, sort of a prank. It's one of the easiest poisons to acquire. Skellebain makes a better prank imo. There's also the risk of someone dropping a keg of cleaning fluid at an IC celebration involving kegs on the floor (this has happened to me, many PCs laughed because I was playing an elf but luckilly I had few sets of cures). There's shitmugging, but that's fallen out of fashion. But as far as wildlife is concerned there's Kryl that people will unwittingly lure out of the grey who will park up by the north road. They tend to get stuck there, and will attack people who haven't gone into the grey who are simply trying to run errands, and they can have a wide variety of poisons, from blindness poisons to straight up rage poisons which, if you survive the fight with a club-tail you may be fighting your mount next. As far as I know there are no cures for these, so they're still scary even if you have the cures for minor poisons. Cure degredation would make these slightly scarier, but it would mostly impact newbs trying to log near morin's running into a cilops, who will dose you with bloodburn, which can be fatal if untreated or not shrugged off. Cures are already difficult enough to manage and coordinate without degredation (or maybe they have degredation now, I haven't been paying attention lately), and the services of a skilled apothacary will always be in high demand, so if that's the concern I'm unsure it should be. I remember what a pain in the ass it was to be one of the primary cure/bandage crafters in the Byn and spam-crafting these things into oblivion so our units would be properly equipped. It involved sitting at a bench and having to avoid other duties on orders of the Sergeant. As far as degredation of spice, I'm unsure how adding another downside to an RP prop that is already completely full of coded downsides is a good idea, but ymmv.
Dropping a keg, in a party, and counting on people not checking keywords, is suspect AF.
The rest of it, sounds perfectly fine to me. Let the roads get dangerous, let people be more wary and hire some of those byn Merc rank pcs to tag along, and give them something to do. There is a LOT to be said, for simply not doing things, your pc is not prepared for, both as ooc common sense, and as an ic response to such considerations. If my pc cant handle a spider, and often even when they can, they'll shy away from fighting them, unless properly motivated.
I do agree, however, that spice going bad, is completely absurd, given spice is already barely relevant and horridly implemented, insofar as an in-character "thing" goes. It needs to be made easier to proliferate of more enticing to players, as spice hunters, smugglers and peddlers, and as consumers. It could be a cool angle, especially in Allanak, but it's suuuuuuuuuuuuch a drag, to smuggle it, to peddle it, to deal with the bloody RETARDED players, that play Templars/soldiers, who think you've got 20k coins to get a nod to smuggle... like, really, guys? Do you even play the same game?
Even nobles will haggle, or blow it off, because they know, OOCly, they're the only game in town. A should-be highly coveted, enticing, illicit substance that takes away ALL of lifes little horrors, for a time, is the least valuable of the illegal commodities.
Of virtually all RP worlds I've dabbled in, Arm is, hands down, the LEAST competent, when it comes to criminal enterprises. Even the drugs, are lame and uninteresting.
Drugs and prostitution, broke like old jokes. You'd think they'd be staples, here.
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grumble
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Post by grumble on Jan 23, 2020 2:09:14 GMT -5
Oh, Vex, I've done prostitution, back when guild merchant was a thing, when you started feeble with no money-making crafting skills so you had to do whatever it takes to survive. Try doing it as a male elven prostitute, that's really fun, it worked, but it sort of backfired in that I essentially got bought by anyone with resources. As far as spice, I agree, I don't think it should degrade, who is going to buy more? The noble houses? What about the rest of us?
The keg thing was fucked, after I swallowed the cure I wayyed a Corporal in the militia about the danger, she carted it off. It would've killed me if I weren't prepared, and if I hadn't immediately responded to the act, as terradin works very quickly, as I've experienced more than once, then I quickly would have insta-died. That was like, plausibly deniable shit-mugging.
But degrading cures, as I said previously, in my opinion, doesn't really add to the game or the environment, even figuring out what most of them do requires you to read more than a trilogy's worth of RP. And as I've added, some poisons there are not cures or preventions for. The only ones not needing a steady supply of cures will be individuals who live way past their prime to the point where their coded skills require a clever magicker and/or assassin to take down, but all their underlings will need them. A solid apothacary will never be out of work.
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Post by triskelion on Jan 23, 2020 14:49:28 GMT -5
Making cures is such a tremendous pain in the ass that cure degradation or herb degradation would be unplayably silly.
Spice also probably shouldn't decay. Maybe the grains that anyone can get, but make the pure kurac stuff last.
Food and armor/weapon decay is fine. Food decay does make it kind of hard to play any kind of chef though since you want to cook all your ingredients right away.
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