Best Of

@Namino

A few things to unpack here:

1. Of course players should kill npcs for xp. This is by design - I'm not sure where you got from my response this shouldn't be the case. If you can elaborate I'm happy to go into that further.

2. I did not feel disrespected - I have a pretty thick skin as things go. I said your post was impolite, which is a poor basis for discourse. Do you disagree?

3. I and the admin team certainly don't seek to disrespect our players. Sometimes there will be disagreement/frustration with decisions, but the goal is always to improve the experience. If you're particularly frustrated with a decision, you're always welcome to message or email me and we can chat about it. We might still come out disagreeing, but we'll probably understand each other's stances a little better.

4. I can't really comment on sexual harassment cases. I will say we do ban people for this though, we just don't advertise it when it happens.

@Namino (yes we're trying to get the reply button fixed):

Performing quests that have a significant impact on an area can cause them to get mad at you where killing them usually wouldn't. Mysia's quest was an oversight, as the difficulty was incorrectly flagged - this has been resolved.

As for pirates hiring: the pirates of Mysia are about a thousand times less murderous than any average Achaean adventurer who employs either mark. Food for thought. Functionally being state actors does not make the average Achaean's actions any less morally objectionable when viewed through a real world lens (or an objectional IC lens for that matter). They won't hire anymore, but thematically I'm not sure I agree them doing so is problematic.

Your post wasn't cranky. It was rude and not really conducive to constructive discussion. We're happy to elaborate/go back and forth/refine, but some civility would be cool and definitely makes the dialogue smoother.

@Sobriquet:

A little off topic but worth a response - you're correct here. Certain people do get advanced access to new classes to test etc, which does give them a little bit of an edge on release (though I'd note that often this benefits the masses as well, since those people are often quick to help which flattens the learning curve a lot). I know some people think that's unfair, but its an unfairness I think has much more benefits than downsides in both the short and the longterm. The advantage quickly levels out and people receive the classes in a much saner state, since the people who tend to test these are very good at telling me where there are issues. I will note however anyone can apply to being a tester, and this is separate to being in the ACC (though there is some natural overlap).

Changes have been live in less than 24 hours. I do see children throwing a tantrum on the internet and being wildly disrespectful to admin. While that was going on adults had a 30s discussion and placed limits on the amount of contracts that could go out in X time, then pulled the posted excess contracts in order to take a step in the right direction. Don't forget how responsive this team is. Lay out your points in problem/solution format so that they're easy to read and address - bullets help. And like any other game, if you're not having fun with it at the moment, put it down and play something else while the kinks get sorted.

@Makarios the idea that adventurers are bloodthirsty nightmares has good potential, but it feels more like a justification than something that's reflected in-game. If that's to be the nature of player characters, I really hope to see it expanded upon going forward. Higher-level adventurers could be met by most NPCs with suspicion by default, while those in Dragonform should inspire open terror. Village feelings could never decay. Phileo could face some sort of retribution for placing credit bounties on the meanest NPCs in the game. There's a lot more here that could be done to make the NPCs seem like they care about being murdered.

I feel like this conversation has highlighted a need for a solution that Lusternia implemented long ago.

Instead of only have PVP, PVE, and questing as options for character advancement regarding level, they added in influence. This is a non-aggressive form of leveling your character which also enabled them to create a world that does actually feel alive, far more than Achaea. For context, it broke down to several different ways you could influence denizens, you could try to sway them to like you more (decreasing village hate), to give you things (get gold), and a few other options.

This also enabled village revolts, which was that a village would align itself with organizations, and give them benefits based on what that village produces to help with the trade ministry. Once in awhile, villages would revolt, and cities would need to go influence them towards their city again, and this created an interesting mix of PVP and PVE, with world impacting consequences.

By comparison, Achaea seems flat and static, there are not meaningful ways to interact with denizens beyond kill them or not, other than the occasional bit of RP that requires admin availability and interest.

In Lusternia, CTF’s were biweekly at set times, village revolts would happen every few weeks at random times, Islands would also be available to capture for your organization every few weeks through aethercrafting, I feel like what Achaea misses the mark in feeling dangerous or alive is in how static its forms of conflict are. Ultimately, the conflict in Achaea is stale because there are not true objectives to achieve beyond tanking, and most of the time that just results in an unused area of a city being unavailable for a couple of months, it doesn’t feel real or threatening.

I’m not suggesting that Achaea needs to become Lusternia, and I do like these changes (other than concerns that the oceans change is actually going to discourage combat rather than encourage it, though I do like the change and felt oceans being treacherous always felt weird, I just think you shouldn’t be able to hire for it, because that’s what is going to discourage people)

Compared to Lusternia, achaea actually does quite a few things a lot better like balancing 1v1 and group combat, the issue is just that balance is wasted because there are so few meaningful forms of conflict.

Regardless of how we all feel about the denizen hiring stuff, can we all just agree that @Harenae's take on their death for hunting in Mysia is heckin' awesome?

@Makarios

In 1996, when Matt Mihaly decided to produce Achaea, he made a series of conscious, willful design decisions regarding this game.

One of those decisions was that the way that players would advance their characters was, largely, through the wanton application of violence, particularly on the denizens of the game. That 'players are far more violent than Mysian pirates' isn't some reflection on the players. It's a reflection on the game. This game encourages, informs, and asks players to interact with the world they are in with violence, because that is the game it is. Achaea is a hack and slash MUD wrapped up in a vague roleplay shell.

If players are treating NPCs like bags of experience to be popped, it's because the fundamental way that Achaea is designed asks them to treat denizens like bags of experience to be popped. Players are interacting with the game world in exactly the way the game was designed to be interacted with, and to put your hands on your hips and go "why are players genociding our NPCs, how violent!" is extremely disingenuous. You know why -- because the game has told them every step of the way for twenty years that that's what NPCs are -- experience bags. Acting like this is some weird emergent player-driven behavior is ridiculous -- people are playing the game as they've been told to play it by the game itself.

If you want players to interact less hostilely to NPCs and treat them as a living breathing part of the world, the thing you have to change is the valid ways to players to achieve advancement outside of murder. Slapping a PvP wrapper around the only actual meaningful way to experience PvE content in Achaea is just punishing people for doing what they've been informed they should be doing. That goes doubly so for quests, which already offer utterly paltry amounts of experience and gold when compared to wanton murder. Having to blindly roll the dice on getting headshot by Mizik as soon as you complete one just further deteriorates the impetus to quest, especially because for some bizarre reason, it's being decided it should be some secret what quests are going to get you contracted. Jumping into Annwyn gives you a warning that you can be killed and you should leave. Every single instance of wandering into this system should also ping the player and warn them off, at the very least.

Finally, as a non sequitur, if you felt disrespected, the feeling is very much mutual. I have watched, with an increasingly curled upper lip, an administrative culture develop around this game that is less and less respectful towards its playerbase, ranging from a disrespect towards our wallets (we cannot increase the bang for the buck, an utterly rampant spread of gambling promotions, so forth), to a disrespect towards our fundamental dignity (a refusal to address sexual harassment in Achaea because we've given you all the tools to perfectly shut your eyes and pretend it isn't happening!), to just simply not respectful of our time. To be performatively waving your hands around, asking why adventurers are so bloodthirsty towards denizens when it's because you made a game that relentlessly asks them to be bloodthirsty and gives them no other options, is just another castigation of everyone's intelligence as far as I'm concerned. Let alone slapping people with PvP consequences for doing precisely what the game itself is demanding of them.

Every time I come to this cursed place I regret it, but since people seem to want to slop my death out as a discussion point, I'm gonna wade in.

I have 0 issues with being killed for pirate murder, which has now happened twice. I hunt that place religiously. They have hated Harenae for nearly 10 years straight, and the feelings are mutual. IMO it's fair that they as an organization would seek vengeance for literally YEARS of me murdering them over and over. Those are, in theory, people with lives and business and relations and personality and I sweep through and execute them. Good on them for getting some vengeance.

I will yell til the end of time that I'm here for RP first and foremost. Everyone playing the game is there for different things, so go for what you love. Mizik dismantled Harenae handily. Why would I whine about my poor experience loss, something it seems nobody cares about unless they want an excuse to complain? Instead, hey look more reasons for RP!

Harenae wrote a poem to Mizik for killing her. Deaths are very inspirational.

Harenae returned to Mysia almost immediately to murder them for daring to attack her.

She died AGAIN from this and now considers herself in a blood feud with Mysia and has a new trait to her personality.

She has a reason to study some additional combat training, if she wants to live longer when things turn violent again.

She had some nice caretaking interactions post-deaths with her citymates.

It's nice to die to something other than horsemilk!

If you want to complain about a change, use someone other than me as an example. I can speak for myself. Or better yet, if you're horrified Mysia would dare hire on a little precious baby non-combatant like Harenae, join her in murdering pirates until they can no longer afford to hire!