I for one support the no XP loss, and believe it should be taken further. My combat utopia:
Drawing back your bow, you release a rainbow to the west! A chorus of laughter and happiness can be heard. -You're alive! Yay! @Cooper skips in merrily from the west. -You're alive! Yay! Cooper giggles happily and invites you to tea. Do you ACCEPT? -You're alive! Yay! You smile and accept Cooper's invitation, tea time! -You're alive! Yay! Hand in hand, you skip off to the west behind Cooper.
(Party) Jarrod says, "Rainbowed COOPER east."
(Party) Jarrod says, "COOPER INVITING FOR TEA. VEILDELIVER LUMP OF SUGAR QUICK!"
(Party) Jarrod says, "NEED THOSE SUGAR LUMPS QUICK."
Teasight: Jarrod has sat down for a lovely spot of darjeeling tea with Cooper.
(Party) Jarrod says, "Now look what you did, guys. We didn't have sugar with that tea. You hurt our feelings."
A coffee contract has been sent out to you by Jarrod and has been accepted by Hirst.
Hirst leaps joyously from the north.
Hirst flings a tarot inscribed with the Friends, and you feel friendlier than you already are.
Hirst flings a tarot inscribed with the image of the Coffeeshop, and a quaint little shop brimming with the smell of coffee appears out of thin air.
Hirst utters a word of command, and a barista entity pours hot water in a cup, mixing it with some ground coffee beans.
e
You feel far too polite to go away from such a delicious-smelling cup of coffee.
A barista entity mixes in some milk and cocoa, stirring with a metal spoon as it does so.
e
You feel far too polite to go away from such a delicious-smelling cup of coffee.
A barista entity, finished with the job, hands you a large cup of coffee. Taking a sip, your senses are taken to a magical land of mystery and wonder as you appreciate the fine work that Hirst's coffee shop has made.
Your joy has fulfilled a coffee contract lovingly given to you by Jarrod.
The rainbows miniskill enables you to cast a wide variety of rainbows from basic emotions. With advanced knowledge of rainbows you will be able to design your own rainbows! Yay!
In order to learn rainbows, you must purchase a permit for 200 credits from the Rainbow Institute of Delos with BUY RAINBOWS PERMIT.
To quickly get started in rainbows, you will need to find rainbow colours. Use NDS LISTPUBLIC RAINBOWS to see all the public rainbow colours.
"A breathtaking scarlet hued rainbow." design 7310, looks like a beautiful one to try. Examine it in further detail with NDS P 7310.
From this we see it calls for scarlet, pink, and a tint of orange. Obtain these colours and take them to a suitable scenic location.
Prisms of Rainbows
-----------------------------
For the low cost of 2000cr, the Veil of the Sphinx has been re-purposed into a source of rainbow colours.
You may REQUEST PRISM from Rainbow Matrix Jarrod Lucoster to receive your Prism.
As funny as this is, it actually sounds WAY harder. Imagine...No sugar for you tea, ugly rainbow color combinations, your not friendly enough and all that skipping, not snuggling your friends, and worst of all, being polite!
. The pervasive aversion of death by 90% of Achaea's populace because of XP loss essentially limits a lot of the game to people who have more XP than they know what to do with, or people who simply give absolutely no to a moderate amount of fucks about losing it in the first place.
I especially liked this part, because it fits me to a tee. Not to mention the fact that anyone in combat slowly becomes it. XP loss ain't horrid after you've lost the same level somewhere upwards of 30 times.
Apparently, this thread has become a "what would happen if Cyrene ruled Achaea" thread.
I'm not sure if I approve or not...
"What would happen if Achaea was literally Lusternia"
I could tolerate it for the amount of honous quests they have. Maybe.
Five months ago I would have called you a bad word for saying Lusternia is a land of fluffy-filled cuddlesnuffers.
Today, I realize that yes, Lusternia has actually become My Little IRE: Friendship is Mandatory.
I like it here. I think I will stay.
Lust is and always has been filled with rainbows, has you playing dress-up and wearing perfume and drinking tea (no hyperbole) to benefit your influencing, and its mount-training system results in pink and purple polka-dotted ponies everywhere.
None of that is that bad though. What stops me from getting into it is how wildly inconsistent Estarra is. "Oh dear, I have no idea how to balance PK. Let's totally redesign everything!" "Let's introduce some new cool-sounding feature that we immediately abandon! Who wants to pilot a clockwork magitek mecha?" "New collectibles!" "I know we have population issues, but we are NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THAT. Instead, new city!"
Apparently, this thread has become a "what would happen if Cyrene ruled Achaea" thread.
I'm not sure if I approve or not...
"What would happen if Achaea was literally Lusternia"
I could tolerate it for the amount of honous quests they have. Maybe.
Five months ago I would have called you a bad word for saying Lusternia is a land of fluffy-filled cuddlesnuffers.
Today, I realize that yes, Lusternia has actually become My Little IRE: Friendship is Mandatory.
I like it here. I think I will stay.
Lust is and always has been filled with rainbows, has you playing dress-up and wearing perfume and drinking tea (no hyperbole) to benefit your influencing, and its mount-training system results in pink and purple polka-dotted ponies everywhere.
None of that is that bad though. What stops me from getting into it is how wildly inconsistent Estarra is. "Oh dear, I have no idea how to balance PK. Let's totally redesign everything!" "Let's introduce some new cool-sounding feature that we immediately abandon! Who wants to pilot a clockwork magitek mecha?" "New collectibles!" "I know we have population issues, but we are NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THAT. Instead, new city!"
"Dragon bashing is out of control, they have too much money, let's reward their normal bashing with sellable items!" "Area attacks are stifling to conflict, let's take those out and introduce a super-powerful bashable area-wide attack!" "Garing and shipreturn are taking too much away from seafaring, let's delete that ability and replace it with a bashable items that lets you do it 500 times before disappearing!"
"Dragon bashing is out of control, they have too much money, let's reward their normal bashing with sellable items!" "Area attacks are stifling to conflict, let's take those out and introduce a super-powerful bashable area-wide attack!" "Garing and shipreturn are taking too much away from seafaring, let's delete that ability and replace it with a bashable items that lets you do it 500 times before disappearing!"
Not to defend spears or orbs, but Achaea is a bastion of stability and sense by contrast.
Spears and orbs? I'm curious how many of them you guys think actually exist. When I checked earlier today, there are 2 orbs in all of Achaea, and six atlatls. Pretty much exactly as expected.
@Ruth and @Cathy, I have FFVII victory music playing everytime I kill something, gets messy if I stormhammer triplekill though
Aurora says, "Tharvis, why are you always breaking things?!" Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh." Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
I am all for a world with consequences, but not shitty, frustrating mechanical consequences.
What consequences would you be "okay" with, then? The consequences should be something people generally care about. Permanent death is not an option, semi-permanent loss of stats is way worse than losing experience, losing items is way worse than losing experience, increasing essence loss only does anything to Order members (and is just another form of experience), what else is there?
What consequences would you be okay with that are not "shitty, frustrating mechanical consequences", in a game where people mostly care about mechanics, to the point where it is normal to buy earrings of true love for PVP? I am honestly baffled by your statement.
I had a lengthy reply written up here, but scrapped it all in favor of this:
If you earnestly believe in the deepest depths of your heart that protracted loss of time on death in a game centered around conflict and strength is a good idea, then you are utterly and irrevocably wrong. Go read what Imperian has done with their exp changes - I think it is something that Achaea should consider implementing in some fashion. I am all for a world with consequences, but not shitty, frustrating mechanical consequences. The pervasive aversion of death by 90% of Achaea's populace because of XP loss essentially limits a lot of the game to people who have more XP than they know what to do with, or people who simply give absolutely no to a moderate amount of fucks about losing it in the first place.
Nobody deserves XP. Nobody deserves anything especially for failing. Upon failing at something you deserve to be punished in order to learn your mistake. The XP loss upon death helps prevent abusable auto bashing and people not giving a damn about dying in a ROLE PLAYING GAME. Every action deserves a consequence. This can very easily be equated to saying I should not be enemied for raiding because that closes off a huge section of the game for me. I prefer RP over combat, yet I've never had the chance to RP with Aurora. This is a direct cause of action/reaction. Hunting, killing, and dying are a very similar case.
Building up your characters RP takes time and effort. It is easy to mes up something with any faction, including your own.
Grinding up XP takes time and effort. It is easy to die and loose that experience.
Anyone that thinks taking away the aspect of risk and reward is forgetting that the frustration we endure from dying and loosing some XP is just another way we become invested in our characters. They are not just some random pre-defined 3D model like in other games, they are the effort that you the player put into it. Times change yes, and the game has reflected those changes. XP loss has already been drastically reduced(which I personally disagreed with), and the average combat level has raised quite a bit. (about lvl 60 and dual trans to lvl 80 quad trans) Dragons have become a much more familiar sight as well. But I'll never ever think that these things are entitled to me and I should get them from time alone. I know that I personally would never care one bit if I died and there was no loss. I'd just run into loosing battles, suicide rush, autobash everything. You can say that hides a bit of the game back from me, but really it just puts things in perspective.
I'll stop here because when I rant I start loosing actual coherent paragraph structure and just jump point to point.
I completely agree that EXP loss is a really boring and mechanical repercussion for death.
The problem is: what's a good repercussion for death?
Alright, XP is a boring mechanical repercussion. Let's treat dying a bit more dynamic and interesting. When you die, your body stays where it is, along with all your items. Anyone is free to come loot your corpse and pack of whatever you had on you until you respawn. This makes dying even more dangerous but now dying is exciting and interesting.
Dying doesn't deserve an interesting mechanical repercussion. It only deserves something that makes you stop and think about what you are doing and give you enough incentive to care about your character's life.
Whenever you die, you must play in rainbowchaea for ten minutes in order to come back to life.
And not just sitting AFK. That's ten minutes of actively participating in tea parties, spontaneously breaking into dance and song, and befriending everyone else who's dead!
Suddenly, holo/radience/whatever traps and failed Yudhi parties will become so much more fun and happy and cuddly for everyone involved!
I completely agree that EXP loss is a really boring and mechanical repercussion for death.
The problem is: what's a good repercussion for death?
You could have severe, but effectively temporary, experience loss. By making it easier to regain lost experience than it was to gain the experience in the first place, for example. This is already in place with ship sinking, your crew loses some experience but regains it quickly (I wouldn't make it quite so fast for player deaths, though).
You could design lots of new, interesting areas to explore while dead (some sort of afterlife/underworld, dream world, etc.), with quests to do and various ways of returning to life more quickly. Imperian had (maybe still has, but I haven't played in years) something kind of like this, with an underworld where you could do quests to get ferry tokens to return to life.
I've thought quite a lot about what sorts of penalties or even benefits could work for death (or other losses/failures), but a lot of them are hard to make work in Achaea.
I love the idea of actually going through the underworld. I mean, now that that's where our characters end up, why not let us explore it?
It could easily get boring after doing it enough times, but if I recall from the flavor text, it's a despairing place where might means very little, so it could be interesting in that regard!
I remember a very long time ago that once you died, you had to navigate through some world and complete a small quest instead of embracing death. Is that another IRE game, or is it Achaea? I honestly can't remember.
There was a MUD I played back in high school where when you died, you had to walk around as a soul and find an item to take back to a priest to resurrect you. No idea if any of the IRE games ever did that, though.
Death should have consequences beyond XP loss. XP loss is a flat, uninteresting and outright frustrating mechanic that is only tangentially related to actual roleplay, so the persistent arguments that "REMOVING XP LOSS FROM DEATH DESTROYS ROLEPLAY!@!11111" are completely invalid and I don't think I've met a single person that has cherished the XP loss component of death as a constructive and character-building element in my five years playing this game.
Death absolutely has consequences. It just needs to not have consequences mechanically enforced on such a base level - XP is hard to get, and even harder to keep if you participate in combat often enough. There is no valid, substantiated argument for retaining XP loss in modern games or even old ones for that matter. I would much prefer people invested the effort spent in the throes of hoarding their precious XP points on actual character development instead. Bashing is already largely a singleplayer affair in a multiplayer game - why perpetuate it? Why have a mechanic that is specifically designed to force someone to disengage with the game in order to become stronger in it? Sure, you can join a raid and hope you snag a last hit, but you are going to have a far greater rate of return bashing, and with gold income to boor.
@Nim has pretty much hit the nail on the head. If there's no XP loss for death, what do we have in its place? Non-mechanical wounding? Stat loss? Money loss? Gear loss? What limitation do we exchange in its place that is not worse than the former option? I honestly don't know. I wish I did. Essence loss on death has tangible consequences (sort of) for people in Orders, which is a good start. Perhaps that could be fleshed out or something? Time spent alive and bashing awards you a small experience and damage bonus which is lost on death (max 5%), call it vitality bonus or something like that. Something that rewards people for staying alive over punishing them for dying.
It's not about XP removal destroying RP, because nobody really associates XP loss to RP. I believe a lot of association is gained from player to character through having something taken away from you. The fear of loss is something that helps spur that pulse pounding combat and general care for your character.. I can tell you that in other games, Idgaf if I die, and combat is relaxed and whatever.
Best comparison I have is FFXI to FFXIV. FFXI is still hugely popular in japan, and yes there is XP loss. In fact, there was a lot of hate in japan about the removal of XP loss, but games these days have to be catered to more casual moneycows. Thing is, I freaked out a lot more in FFXI about dying then I ever will in FFXIV, and I will always look upon my white mage from FFXI with that much more respect. He's been through the trieals, deleveled, and had his ass handed to him, and he still made it all the way through.
Sure it's an annoying mechanic, but it ultimately proves to be more gratifying than dissapointing. I cherish every bit of advancement, mourne every bit of loss, and that's what achaea is about to me.
Comments
I'm not sure if I approve or not...
When Canada rules the world,
things will be... nii~ice.
I could tolerate it for the amount of honous quests they have. Maybe.
So... Lusternia is a future in which Cyrene won Achaea? Got it. ... What? Achaea's the only IRE game I've played... or ever will.
When Canada rules the world,
things will be... nii~ice.
Suck it, Cyrene.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
None of that is that bad though. What stops me from getting into it is how wildly inconsistent Estarra is. "Oh dear, I have no idea how to balance PK. Let's totally redesign everything!" "Let's introduce some new cool-sounding feature that we immediately abandon! Who wants to pilot a clockwork magitek mecha?" "New collectibles!" "I know we have population issues, but we are NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THAT. Instead, new city!"
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
i'm a rebel
-
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
Nobody deserves XP. Nobody deserves anything especially for failing. Upon failing at something you deserve to be punished in order to learn your mistake. The XP loss upon death helps prevent abusable auto bashing and people not giving a damn about dying in a ROLE PLAYING GAME. Every action deserves a consequence. This can very easily be equated to saying I should not be enemied for raiding because that closes off a huge section of the game for me. I prefer RP over combat, yet I've never had the chance to RP with Aurora. This is a direct cause of action/reaction. Hunting, killing, and dying are a very similar case.
Building up your characters RP takes time and effort. It is easy to mes up something with any faction, including your own.
Grinding up XP takes time and effort. It is easy to die and loose that experience.
Anyone that thinks taking away the aspect of risk and reward is forgetting that the frustration we endure from dying and loosing some XP is just another way we become invested in our characters. They are not just some random pre-defined 3D model like in other games, they are the effort that you the player put into it. Times change yes, and the game has reflected those changes. XP loss has already been drastically reduced(which I personally disagreed with), and the average combat level has raised quite a bit. (about lvl 60 and dual trans to lvl 80 quad trans) Dragons have become a much more familiar sight as well. But I'll never ever think that these things are entitled to me and I should get them from time alone. I know that I personally would never care one bit if I died and there was no loss. I'd just run into loosing battles, suicide rush, autobash everything. You can say that hides a bit of the game back from me, but really it just puts things in perspective.
I'll stop here because when I rant I start loosing actual coherent paragraph structure and just jump point to point.
I completely agree that EXP loss is a really boring and mechanical repercussion for death.
The problem is: what's a good repercussion for death?
Alright, XP is a boring mechanical repercussion. Let's treat dying a bit more dynamic and interesting. When you die, your body stays where it is, along with all your items. Anyone is free to come loot your corpse and pack of whatever you had on you until you respawn. This makes dying even more dangerous but now dying is exciting and interesting.
Dying doesn't deserve an interesting mechanical repercussion. It only deserves something that makes you stop and think about what you are doing and give you enough incentive to care about your character's life.
Whenever you die, you must play in rainbowchaea for ten minutes in order to come back to life.
And not just sitting AFK. That's ten minutes of actively participating in tea parties, spontaneously breaking into dance and song, and befriending everyone else who's dead!
Suddenly, holo/radience/whatever traps and failed Yudhi parties will become so much more fun and happy and cuddly for everyone involved!
You could design lots of new, interesting areas to explore while dead (some sort of afterlife/underworld, dream world, etc.), with quests to do and various ways of returning to life more quickly. Imperian had (maybe still has, but I haven't played in years) something kind of like this, with an underworld where you could do quests to get ferry tokens to return to life.
I've thought quite a lot about what sorts of penalties or even benefits could work for death (or other losses/failures), but a lot of them are hard to make work in Achaea.
I will ABSOLUTELY quit playing Achaea if they ever remove it here.
Viva la Bluef.
I love the idea of actually going through the underworld. I mean, now that that's where our characters end up, why not let us explore it?
It could easily get boring after doing it enough times, but if I recall from the flavor text, it's a despairing place where might means very little, so it could be interesting in that regard!
It's not about XP removal destroying RP, because nobody really associates XP loss to RP. I believe a lot of association is gained from player to character through having something taken away from you. The fear of loss is something that helps spur that pulse pounding combat and general care for your character.. I can tell you that in other games, Idgaf if I die, and combat is relaxed and whatever.
Best comparison I have is FFXI to FFXIV. FFXI is still hugely popular in japan, and yes there is XP loss. In fact, there was a lot of hate in japan about the removal of XP loss, but games these days have to be catered to more casual moneycows. Thing is, I freaked out a lot more in FFXI about dying then I ever will in FFXIV, and I will always look upon my white mage from FFXI with that much more respect. He's been through the trieals, deleveled, and had his ass handed to him, and he still made it all the way through.
Sure it's an annoying mechanic, but it ultimately proves to be more gratifying than dissapointing. I cherish every bit of advancement, mourne every bit of loss, and that's what achaea is about to me.