Release notes

Which is a shit fuck more dangerous and expensive to do then turaals, or stilt lizards.


By the way. Can someone 'confirm' the turaals were nerfed as well? Are you talking from experience, Oldtwink?

It kind of stands to reason that they'd nerf both. They were the two quintessential ultra-agile animals, both relatively near a city and in an otherwise fairly safe region. Technically you could go and grind on rantarri or mantis and get the same general results, but people don't usually do that, for obvious reasons. I have in the past, though. Them and halflings, which are now gone.

Not that I usually advocate making skilling up harder on players, but isn't this fixing a problem that people complained about? I don't remember whether it was here or on the GDB, but people were complaining that in order to branch advanced weapons people felt the need to go and do things that don't even make sense, like fighting weak and fast critters. Now the fast critters that are available for high-level skilling are far from weak, so it actually makes sense that they would be the sorts of beasts that one would go and face in order to become a master. Because of this, now it would seem that there is more danger involved in becoming a master, like there should be.

I'm the first to admit that I'm pretty naive about what it's like to actually skill up a combat char, though, so my arguments really do come from a place of ignorance.

I agree that this helps the players willing to pack into clans.  A number of players arent.

There are now (I think) six beasts you can use past jman.   Two of them can one shot or consistently reel lock most pcs.   One of them is humanoid, and declared off limits by imms.   One of them hits as hard as an ankheg, swings faster, and tends to run in groups.  This means that pcs intending to grind weapon skills outside clans will be in one of two hunting areas.  

Pvp will come out of this nerf, forcing players even more into clans.  Some players will, and some will leave the game.

The thing is that people did those nonsensical things because it was more or less the only way to do it. Removing that option doesn't fix anything other than perhaps lessening the advantage of being indie (or in one of the few clans where dicking around in the northern wilderness was an option). Unless you happen to have a very long-lived elven warrior with high agility in your clan, there are now no reasonably accessible sources of skillgains beyond the plateau, which is about mid-journeyman for weapon skills.

The change to combat skillgains against superior opponents doesn't really do anything, because the problem has always been that once you get to that stage, you can't actually miss anymore against anyone you're likely to be sparring against. So, making it so that you gain more when you miss doesn't really accomplish anything. Contrary to popular belief, some of these combat skills don't actually need a bunch of failures in order to increase, but increase by a fraction of a point, leading people to think that you need a ton of misses for a chance to skill up.

This is why ultra long-lived characters can end up mastering their weapon skills even in the Byn. You go out once every two weeks and fight a silt horror, you'll get your +0.2 to slashing or whatever, and over the course of numerous RL months you'll finally get there. But it takes such a retardedly long time that it feels broken, and the issue is that you stop missing with any regularity long before you're at a point where it makes sense that your improvement should stall. Nothing is really gained by making it so that training with professional combat trainers is the worst way to learn to fight, and this change doesn't do anything about that.

Stilt lizards were an imperfect solution to flawed code. Removing them without addressing the issue just leaves players with no way to work around the fundamentally broken skillgain system.

... which was my point about nerfing wildlife gains to make being an indy harder to make clans more attractive.

If they wanted to make clans more attractive without removing something from the game, they should have just increased the skillgains from fighting someone superior to you in skill while leaving everything else alone. The staff have historically used the indy vs clanned numbers to figure out which parts of the game are "too easy" rather than which kinds of activity do people clearly want to do that our management of the clans prevents. Shit like this happens because of that; they still have the mentality they need to make the world more dangerous and less rewarding for independents in order to get people into clans.

The only result of this change is going to be indies grinding longer, not them joining clans, because lowering their skillgains doesn't address the fundamental problems of clan management. I would not be surprised to see future "balanace adjustments" like this because-- I was going to say more about clans, but I realize it'd be better just to start a new thread on the subject.