Quick Questions

Anedhel

Well, different generations, I suppose. Anedhel was born during a time when one of the original children of Maya guided him to find an orb that contained the potential to harness the power of dragons and everything that comes with that. 

Achaeans are also immortal, can do incredible things, and treat harm and misfortune like nothing more than a nuisance, so while I'm not sure what to make of the current intro, I'd say they're still pretty much super-people. 

At any rate, percentages are a bit more easy to reconcile, though still really hard to wrap my head around (which is why I avoid even that IC). I don't like the idea of moving Achaea -further- in the direction of numbers, though, because at some point, it really does stop being a game where you receive input in the form of descriptions and words, and you just get numbers instead, which is super sad to think about. 

Sarathai

Anedhel said:

Achaeans are also immortal, can do incredible things, and treat harm and misfortune like nothing more than a nuisance, so while I'm not sure what to make of the current intro, I'd say they're still pretty much super-people.

I have no problems with RPing as if Adventurers were (and are) semi-immortals who casually wield afflictions and abilities that no denizen can, treat death like a revolving door (and where many have personally punched Ugrach in the face or otherwise killed the Lord of the Underworld and gotten away with it multiple times), kill each other for fun or simply to test a theory, talk about weird insane things on telepathic channels, and are just generally... different. Not to mention we all have a body count well into the thousands if we happen to be a dragon. Some of us would make the most evil, genocidal lunatics of real life look like kindly old grandmothers by comparison.

Anedhel

Right. So even if you have a little trouble with pygmies when you're 18, being able to do all that stuff the next day kinda still makes you superhuman, and not just a regular Joe, I think. 

Ahmet

The real issue (for me, at least) is the prevalence of numbers IC. The more people are given numbers, the more comfortable they feel about discussing them ICly. Makes me nauseous when people discuss things like stats or direct damage (or issues and bugs - you know who you are) on city channels.

Frederich

Can you issue against someone that keeps repeatedly issuing you with little to no actual reason for it?

Korben

Bashing is a multivariable problem: what you are bashing for (gold, XP or talisman pieces), what resources you spend to bash, DPS, tankiness, travel ability and (sometimes) getaway ability. Best DPS does not necessarily equate to best bashing class.

Anedhel

@Ahmet is strong with the Force.

Krypton

Frederich said:

Can you issue against someone that keeps repeatedly issuing you with little to no actual reason for it?

Anybody who does that is already digging themselves into a ditch. No point dragging yourself into it, too.

Farrah

Armali said:

Well you should fix it because it gets really annoying (pretty please with a cherry on top)

Queue add class queue add eqbal <attack string>. Yw.

Kiskan

Vessil said:

To whoever insinuated that too many numbers killed Imperian and Aetolia: No clue why Aetolia is like it is, as I've never played it seriously. Imperian's dwindling population is due to 110 different things(back-to-back poorly received class revamps, buggy/short-sighted/bad systems(shrines/relics, obelisks, caravans, boneyards), the death of combat outside of shardfalls, the lackluster cult/sect system that replaced Orders/Gods with Entities that tended to be active for extremely short periods of time before being unceremoniously killed off in poorly scripted battle scenes, a massive population imbalance that has been present for years that refuses to self-correct, a dwindling midbie class, a poorly designed lvl 100+ system, among other things). The constant QoL improvements(including giving more specific info about XP, showing def mana drains, COOLDOWNS, etc) are among the only things I see universally applauded by players there.

Yeah, I don't think too many numbers is a problem in Imperian at all.  I think you can do either one, and it's absolutely fine - except one way is going to drive one set of people absolutely nuts, and vice versa.  I am currently looking for spoilers for a movie that comes out in December, so guess which kind I am.  

Aetolia's biggest problem seems to be, in a nutshell, that they let you see exactly what affs an opponent has, and that lends itself (further) to automation.  Neither Impy nor Achaea do that.  Aetolia also just has so many out of the box systems that are amazing and beep boop their way to murderating your opponents so it's hard to justify making your own shitty system when the newb that just started playing this week is owning people at those Ylem things with CATS (Carnifex system).

If anything, I feel like two things in combination contributed a lot to Imperian's current problem (lack of PK-ers, lack of PK).  First, We have an incredible amount of QoL stuff (fine on its own), and also, the perception that Imperian is totally "safe" (which, it actually is at the moment, and that is bad).  I think the combination of those two things made the game incredibly attractive to players who like absolute comfort, and who hate anything that might interrupt their routine whatsoever - certainly ANY kind of unscripted combat, EVER.  And that helped drive away the sort of players we needed more of.  Imperian took a great, great idea, which was "we want to make people way more comfortable dipping a toe into PK, and not have to feel like they will be hunted into oblivion" and has taken it way, way too far.  We have taken it into the realm of people not wanting their corn to ever, ever touch their peas under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

That said, we'd probably still be okay, but we're small.  If we lose a Jhui or a Dunn, we don't have a full roster of "also pretty darned good" guys to take their place and be a catalyst for combat.  We're much, much more vulnerable to "great combat leader guy is super busy at work" at the best of times.   

But the whole numbers thing really is one of those "I like this" or "no no, I hate this" things, not something that in and of itself breaks a game.  That's BS.

Viho

Snipped.

Elynithara

Re: @Kiskan

I agree with all of that. Times a gazillion.

Kiskan

Viho, sorry (hey, we're all a bit protective of the good old home game).  tbh, if I were super serious about Aetolia I could probably try to make it work - but I was definitely filthy casual (Carnifex).  It wasn't that I didn't have a meteoric rise though - it really was that CATS worked incredibly well, way, way, way better than anything I'd have been able to build in any reasonable amount of time.  I basically felt like "I can't NOT use this thing, because I will literally be the shittiest guy at any of these Ylem thingies because not using CATS".

EDIT:  we're actually in the very, very early stages of possibly having a similar problem in Imperian - there's a very, very good system that covers a lot of classes, and enough people have bought it to matter.  It is what it is.

Khel

God, please, my ego. All this talk of my CATS is going to make me play again so I can polish it some more.

Atalkez

I dabble with Carnifex completely manual, and do just fine at the Lessers.

You don't NEED systems to do stuff for you, you just need the experience and motivation to make it work.

Zahan

Ahmet said:

The real issue (for me, at least) is the prevalence of numbers IC. The more people are given numbers, the more comfortable they feel about discussing them ICly. Makes me nauseous when people discuss things like stats or direct damage (or issues and bugs - you know who you are) on city channels.

Thank you for responding with something reasonable and not just lollinking a video or saying "boohoo to you." 

To me, it seems obvious that it boils down to pure preference.  

Other than "i want -you- to see a % because -i- have more fun that way", there is no valid reason to take away something we've had for longer than the current administration has even known about achaea.

If this was <pretty much any random mmo>, then they could afford to make rash decisions without consequence because they can just go pick up more players by running a decent promo (ie one that affects more than just the p2w monsters) or by putting on a decent event that most people are able to participate in (ie not this avatar bs).

But it's not.  It's a dying text game riddled with easy-to-fix bugs in an age where you can see the fine hairs on a stripper's ass in GTA.  Achaea is from a time before gfx and when gfx games became a thing, a lot of us didn't have good enough computers to play them.  Now, though, you can get a POS laptop from walmart for a couple hundred bucks and load up gw2 or bdo or bns or archeage or eso or any number of other games with no problem.

If you want immersion, and you're sitting here staring at "You jab an orc with a rapier", I'm calling bs.  I am suggesting you try one of the many amazing mmos out there right now.  There are plenty of places you can go be immersed without having to whine for changes to be made to decades-old systems that you only selfishly want.

There are very few people left playing these IRE games and a sizeable portion of the population are coders/scripters/crunchers.  In my opinion, being able to use my coding experience to directly affect my gametime is one of the only things this game has going for it over all the other amazing choices out there.  The arpee'rs aren't going to leave this game because someone said 600 instead of 6% but you will end up driving away some of your more dedicated nerds/number crunchers/coders if you're removing their reasons for being here over somewhere else.

Which is why, to me, it seems very short-sighted of the administration.  The kid running around the forest mudsexting with noobs and crying about his arpee being interrupted by seeing a number on his screen, isn't the guy keeping the servers powered up - it's the guy who's crunching numbers and appreciating overpriced benefits as measly as 0.3 second faster recovery on staffcast that costs the same as a full suit of armor, sword, and mount combined in any other game today, that's keeping the lights on.  

All of it is made even more disappointing by the persistence of so many issues, while they're taking the time instead to step on the longterm playerbase's toes.  I'd much rather see the time spent taking out features many of us have been using for years instead spent on basic game maintenance such as going through the bard skills and fixing typos that have existed since its creation, or correcting the variable on the mysian parrot minipet (literally would take 10 seconds) that I bugged some 5 years ago.

Adeleine

Zahan said:

Other than "i want -you- to see a % because -i- have more fun that way", there is no valid reason to take away something we've had for longer than the current administration has even known about achaea.

Nobody's actually seriously suggesting that. All detailed information is and should be opt-in. The people who like numbers should be able to see numbers, and the people who like vague, mysterious text should be able to see vague, mysterious text. You can even do this right now; try CONFIG PROMPT TEXT to turn all those ugly, confusing numbers into neat and inaccurate text values!

As an aside, the existence of numbers does not break immersion. I'm a very heavy roleplayer; I roleplay my character in every MMO I play, and I don't scream and hide under the bed whenever I see someone say "My health is 5000" or "I'm at room 1234". There are ways to justify these kinds of things in-character (such as "I have a map with a coordinate grid") and it doesn't bother me at all.

Dunn

Guess the thread isn't titled "Quick Answers"

Also, falcon health removal wasn't a recent change. Been this way at least a year or so. 

Vender

honestly just do pt my map coordinates are 343243, immersion preserved.

what do you do when you have to target by denizen id or buy from a shop when you want a specific item? is your immersion ruined?

Makarios

Ok, guys. No objection to the current topic of discussion, but let's move it out of this thread - this is intended as a resource for getting responses to minor questions quickly, and this discussion looks like its going to go on for a while.

Zahan

Dunn said:

Guess the thread isn't titled "Quick Answers"

Also, falcon health removal wasn't a recent change. Been this way at least a year or so. 

And we're still talking about it.  Weird, huh?  I guess that means it matters.

It's not so much the exact action that disturbs me as much as it is the mindset of the change, and that going forward.  

Honestly, I probably would have just not bothered to say anything, like usual, but that bs response about it just hit a weird button with me that hasn't been pressed in a very long time.

edit: oops. sorry, mak - posted that right as you posted yours

Ahmet

@Zahan The problem is though, the more prevalent those precise numbers are, the more canon they become, and the more likely people are to use them in-character. I'm not saying that's okay, but it happens far too often as-is. That doesn't need to become more prevalent.

As well, to go along with @Makarios' points:

You're wrong when you say the availability of that information doesn't take away from people who don't want to utilise it. The availability of the information further disadvantages those who don't have the time, experience, or knowledge to use that information to its fullest potential. It's all well and good to say that they don't need to bother with it, but by not bothering they're immediately less effective than those who have access to the numbers. Some immersion breaks (item/denizen ids, room numbers) are absolutely necessary for basic functionality. Achaea hasn't ever been friendly to those who try to min/max. As you said, there are other MUDs that fill that niche. If you want that, Achaea isn't the place for you.

As far as immersion goes, I'm a huge proponent of mmos, and I've tried so many I probably can't remember them all. None have come anywhere close to Achaea. The sheer depth that a text game allows for just can't be replicated in a 3d environment, even with the cutting edge of today's technology. It's just not feasible, especially when it comes to user-generated content.

I understand what you're wanting, and I can't say I'd be too unhappy about it, but there are consequences that would come along with such transparency, and I really don't think the end result would be healthy for Achaea overall. And since you mentioned our local whales as an argument in your favour, I'm fairly certain that some, if not most, of the biggest monetary contributors to Achaea, are strong opponents of such transparency.

ETA: Oops. Started ranting before Mak posted. Time to run away.

Zahan

Daeir said:

Zahan said:

Ahmet said:

The real issue (for me, at least) is the prevalence of numbers IC. The more people are given numbers, the more comfortable they feel about discussing them ICly. Makes me nauseous when people discuss things like stats or direct damage (or issues and bugs - you know who you are) on city channels.

But it's not.  It's a dying text game riddled with easy-to-fix bugs in an age where you can see the fine hairs on a stripper's ass in GTA.  Achaea is from a time before gfx and when gfx games became a thing, a lot of us didn't have good enough computers to play them.  Now, though, you can get a POS laptop from walmart for a couple hundred bucks and load up gw2 or bdo or bns or archeage or eso or any number of other games with no problem.

What does the difficulty of fixing a bug have to do with the graphical fidelity of another, entirely different online game? Who gives a flying fuck about what other things you could possibly be doing with your time? We're not dense, we all know that these options exist, yet we choose to spend our time playing Achaea instead.

You've apparently never coded for a live-production game project in your life, judging from what you've said. "Literally 10 seconds to change a variable" falls eternally by the wayside when there's like fifty different features you want to implement, large-overarching changes that you want to make, new systems and refactors that need to be completed to allow things that there's deadlines for. Shit like fixing typos is what you do in the downtime between these projects, or something that you train someone who doesn't code major things full time to do. Neglecting these things does not belie any sort of stagnation in a project - if anything, the near-immediate fixing of these issues often suggests a lack of creative direction from above, in my experience. If you code, you know that you want to code interesting things, not variable-change bugfixes, for christ's sake.

Suspension of disbelief is a huge part of keeping the notion alive for people who enjoy that sort of thing, and being given exact, unflinchingly accurate details about everything in the game shatters that suspension. It removes the mystery. Some people enjoy the minmax, others don't. Defaulting to occluding game values is standard for most video games as it provides a lot of "meta" gameplay for the people who like that sort of thing anyway.

Your assertion that the people paying for mechanical combat advantage are the ones that are keeping the game's lights on are also completely wrong. There's a HUGE number of "whale" spenders on Achaea that never set foot in combat - literally 30 grand's worth of credits just got sunk out of the game's economy in a recent set of auctions, the vast majority of it for purely cosmetic changes. The reason Achaea continues to exist is because it has a diverse set of players who enjoy it - if the people who come to the game to seek escape and enjoy some RP were to suddenly vanish, the support structures that give a lot of people who play PK would vanish with them, and there'd be almost no reason for anyone to bother playing anymore.

Artefacts only possess as much value as the game world itself does. If there's nobody to use them on, they're functionally worthless.

I have been intensely critical of how the administration has handled things in the time that I've been playing Achaea. Shit, I was shadowbanned for it once. I thought to myself, "how hard can it be to do this?", so I walked off and started contributing my time and code to a game of similar size and scope, and learned a whole fucking lot about how the shit goes down.

It is never as straightforward as you think.

It's interesting you say that.  The reason I was not playing achaea full time the last handful of years is precisely because I was working with a major gaming company on 2 separate titles.  And that is the reason for me being so critical.  It's not a mystery to me anymore.  I was being generous with the 10 seconds, it would be done in a few seconds by somebody already familiar with the database.  Now it might take a bit to get booted in, but the fix would be there just "waiting to go live."  A lot of bugs I hear about still existing years later really are as simple as changing a value in a neatly organized file or database.

Trey

I don't necessarily think that anything you're asking for is completely unreasonable, Zahan. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but it's your approach making you appear to be a twat of Viola-sized proportion and elasticity that's causing me to scoff at and summarily dismiss most of what you're saying.

Ahmet

My question, what the hell does the speed of fixing a small bug have anything to do with transparency of mechanics?

Makarios

I was actually curious about that bug, so did do some digging. It'd appears its not actually in the system (or at least, I can't see it); either it was a casualty of one of the old purges or someone fixed it and it reoccured. Feel free to rebug it and someone will look into it as time permits, those kinds of bugs rarely last long.

Zahan

@trey thank you for the support.  I also appreciate your criticism.

I know that some people like getting a ribbon for showing up last in a race, but that's just not my style.  I have a sharp edge and I've actually gotten a lot better at being softer so that I am easier for strangers to tolerate.  At the end of the day though, I am who I am.  I like straight-forward bluntness as much as some people like to have their hand held.

If I was being totally unrealistic and just a royal dick without merit, then apparently I'm in good company because my posts are getting upvotes (hahaha).  I don't think that's the case though.  Admittedly I have been a little harsh and that's my own problem due to holding achaea to a higher standard and how I tend to present my point, but not to a degree that deserves dismissal.  

We're also not talking about a thriving game - only a couple hundred people showed up to a massive events that's been hyped for at least a full month.  That is just about the same number of people who would have been on anyway, since it was primetime.  That's the same number of people who show up at a daily primetime event, on the lowest population NA server (of like 20 servers) in the last game I played.  People were calling that server dead and demanding a merge.

The thought of achaea closing someday does bother me even though they said it wasn't in danger recently.  I have an old love for achaea since I've been playing it for most of my life (longer, even, than my parents were around), and I do want it to grow.  It has a certain familiarity that just can't be replaced.  Now with gmcp info, the potential for GUIs is almost unfathomable.  I believe this game could easily stand out, even now in this world of intense graphic simulations, and become huge if the right effort (and some money) were put into it.

All that said, I will try to be a bit softer.  I'm noticing people around here are a bit more sensitive than I've gotten used to lately.  Or maybe just nicer.  I'll tone it down and settle in.

And so to drag this thread back on topic....


What are some things you all would say to your friends or spouse to convince them to try achaea?  

Makarios

"I married someone in this game earlier."

Krypton

"I got to reenact some Game of Thrones-level shit by ripping my fiance's heart out of his chest at the altar."

Ahmet

"I went to a queer pride rave with a Goddess in Her temple."