Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 6.2K All Categories
- 3.1K Everything Achaea
- 1.5K North of Thera
- 26 Archives of the Terraformer
- 257 The Matsuhama Arena
- 885 The Golden Dais of Creation
- 299 The Scarlattan Theatre
- 149 The Blank Canvas
- 2K Getting Help
- 412 General Questions
- 258 Quick Class Questions
- 1.3K Tech Support
- 313 Client Help
- 486 Curing Systems and Scripts
- 841 Off-Topic
- 255 The Wander Inn
- 586 The Universal Membrane
- 298 Class Discussions
- 298 Individual Class Sections
- 20 Alchemist
- 9 Apostate
- 30 Blademaster
- 9 Depthswalker
- 14 Druid
- 4 Infernal
- 20 Jester
- 19 Magi
- 34 Monk
- 11 Occultist
- 8 Paladin
- 7 Priest
- 29 Runewarden
- 18 Sentinel
- 26 Serpent
- 20 Shaman
- 9 Sylvan
Comments
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
I think this is a dead horse at this point. The consensus seems to be Veils suck, but are useful for the people who bought them. We need to add a city font to kill Veil while sanction is up.
I can see an argument for Marks to bypass if you have a contract. $600 shouldn't make you impervious (without outside influences) to the retribution of a city/org due to a non-veil Mark getting the contract, imo.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
The best they've been is "Yeah, but it doesn't actually hurt anyone, so why not." type responses.
TL;DR: Delete veils plox.
Veils are fine as an artefact, but they do present a paywall that makes 2 important aspects of Achaean life unreasonably difficult:
- Marks
fulfilling contracts, which is an Admin-sponsored method of IG problem
resolution, and thus people shouldn't be able to "buy out" of that.
Marks being able to see through Veils on their targets seems perfectly
reasonable to me for this.
- Locating Veiled enemies inside
your own city. Is this impossible to overcome? No, but we've all been in
situations where we've been raided by a small group of Veiled A-list
raiders, and haven't had a Veil of our own to find them. Trying to track
a Veiled Serpent in your city, even with a Veil of your own, can feel
like an exercise in futility. Once you set foot on enemy territory like
that, they deserve a fair chance to find you and engage you. A font
ability that disables Veils for a time seems perfectly reasonable to me
for this.
If solutions to these two issues can be resolved, then I don't think Veils need to go anywhere. Veils are fine most of the time, and a perfectly valid and desirable convenience for many, (like buckawns boots) they just shouldn't offer the level of immunity that they do in these particular cases.I do agree with point 2, there should be a way for cities to detect veiled raiders.
That seems to get at the most fundamental problem here.
Being veiled so people can't bother you seems more or less fine. Being veiled to sneak around seems acceptable. Being veiled to rob people doesn't seem like a big problem. In general, being veiled as a pre-emptive measure seems fine across the board. I don't even think that avoiding long-term consequences is a particularly big deal (though I do think marks could stand to have some way to see through them).
The only big problem seems to be immunity to the immediate consequences of your actions. I haven't ever seen anyone expressing that being able to attack people and then avoid reprisal because they can't find you is okay.
So why not just solve that problem directly? Veils would still be plenty useful. They'd still be just as useful in every situation except immediately after attacking someone. And even in a raid, even after you've engaged and attacked someone, we're only talking about one or two people you targeted being able to locate you for a few minutes, and only if your attack fails and leaves them alive.
(To head off a rebuttal: yes, the veil-wearer could run away for five minutes after every attack. But if they're doing that, you've already hamstrung their ability to cause the sort of problems that make people dislike veils, and it's almost always possible to hunt someone down so long as you can tell where they are.)
Functionally, it would just be an assurance that, after a veiled person attacks, someone can locate them even if you don't have a veiled person around on your side.
And, while I'm sure some people would complain (some people always complain - particularly people who don't care about the change and are just looking for an excuse to trade in an artefact they no longer wanted anyway), I don't think such a change would even really necessitate a refund. Anyone who bought a veil specifically to avoid the short-term consequences of their aggressive actions probably shouldn't get a refund - in much the same way that if they made swords unable to kill newbies, I don't think people who complained that they wanted a refund on their artefact sword because they bought it specifically to kill newbies would be catered to. The stance of the admin and the game toward avoiding the consequences of your actions has always been pretty clear, even if there still remain ways to do it. Demanding a refund over this would be like saying "I bought this item specifically to affect the game in what is widely perceived to be a negative way and I can't anymore so I want a refund".
Anyone noticed that annoying nearly impossible to hinder movement called evade?
can we delete that instead? You all can keep your fancy veils.
Now, the recent Mark change has ameliorated this to an extent, as Marks can now choose the targets they want to take, and thus non-Veiled Marks can just try their best to avoid Veiled targets, leaving them for other, Veiled Marks. But the problem remains that a majority of contracts taken out are going to be on "big" targets who will have Veils, and so in order to be a "good" Mark, you essentially must own a Veil. I don't think that's the worst injustice in the world, since almost all good Marks are likely to have some artefacts on them, and thus have a higher probability of affording a Veil, but I still don't think it's fair or good that there's arguably a 2000cr entrance fee to become a respectable Mark.
These do exist, and I think they're good for special occasions, but I don't think they're an adequate solution for either of the outlined problems. It's not reasonable to buy a Shroud every time you get raided by a Veiled team, or every time a Mark needs to take a contract on a Veiled target. These things happen far too commonly for a one-off 50cr solution to be practical.
Edit:
I actually wouldn't suggest this, as this comes closer to Klendathu's concern of "if Veils don't make me hard to find, why have a Veil?" I think it's perfectly fair to pay 2000cr and be difficult for the playerbase at large to locate. It's only Marks, who exist as part of the Admin-designed system through which the players police themselves, who need to be able to cut through Veils like that. during raids, where fair conflict depends on being able to find the other guys, where Veils should be addressed.
There is nothing wrong with the Veil's intended function, it's only an a problem when that function defeats other systems' intended functions, and Marks and raids are the only times I really see that happening.
Edit: Achilles corrected me below. Neither can see the target.
Not that I agree about veils being stupid, just that if it's a huge issue for contracts, it can be adjusted for.
Again, I don't own a veil, but I actually do think it's unfair to veil owners to just nerf this particular artifact, rather than deleting it and giving credit refunds (which most of them will probably spend on flower pots). We've sort of touched on it throughout the thread, but the innate nature of veils means that veil owners have already seen the value of their purchase decline significantly as more people have bought veils. People intuitively understand this, and that's why they've repeatedly shot down cheaper artifacts that would allow others to pierce veils - which other people want because people hate veils...
So yeah, the more people who own veils, the less effective they are. To a large extent, veils have already been very heavily nerfed, just through purchases, because that is just how veils work (and yet another reason they are awful, really). Yes, you could argue that this is true about a lot of artifacts - but not in quite the same way as is the case with veils. An interesting contrast that is sort of the other side of the coin is the aural earring that allows you to hear shouts. No one purchases that artifact... because no one has purchased that artifact. If THAT were a commonly purchased artifact, its value would actually increase (and yells and shouts would be relevant again) - but enough people would have to buy it first.
EDIT: this is even true with people who have bought veils just to be able to locate people really, because it actually becomes "welp, who's going to take the 2K credit hit so we can locate those raiding a-holes". Really, it's even more true for them.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Just forget the aural earrings if it's too much of a distractor - although, not so long ago there was an entire Golden Dais discussion about aural earrings that pretty much centers around their chilling effect on the use of shouts: http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/2835/aural-earring-lets-change-it-finally/p1
... bottom line though, if I were a veil owner who's disillusioned with veils, I'd keep pushing for deletion, and as a non veil owner, I'd also keep pushing for deletion, because the underlying idea of veils is ridiculous in the first place and almost everyone seems to be on the same page there.
As you have alluded to, there are other artefacts that get the hackles of the baying forum masses up, perhaps not to the extreme of veils, but where do we stop once we've started down the path of "delete all the things"? Not the flowerpots, think of the flowerpots!
Veils would still make you harder to find. They would make you harder to find in every single situation except right after you attack someone and fail to kill them, which seems like the thing people are most annoyed about - people being able to attack and then face no repercussions because no one can locate them. That sort of avoidance of repercussions has been frowned upon in the game by the community and the admin as long as I've been playing.
Veils would still make you hard to find (a) generally (b) before you actually commit an aggressive action (c) 5 minutes after you commit an aggressive action (d) to everyone other than the person you actually attacked. People without a veil still can't locate you when you're in the UW. People without a veil still can't locate you to gank you. People without a veil still can't locate you while you're trying to rob people. People without a veil still can't locate you to hunt you down for something you did more than five minutes ago or for being a soldier or an enemy or to claim a bounty. So long as you kill your targets when you attack them, you still can't even be located. You can still gank with impunity so long as you don't mess it up, but if you do, people get five minutes to potentially fight back - you don't get to attack someone, fail to kill them, and then walk a few rooms away and suddenly they don't get to fight back. You can still do guerrilla-style raiding (which a font power would not allow for), you just have to be careful and strategic and make sure you kill your targets rather than running around just annoying everyone with non-lethal snipe-and-run tactics.
It seems like a pretty fair middle ground that allows veiled people to enjoy virtually all of the benefits they currently do, but allows people to locate their attackers for reprisal when they're the target of a failed gank and allows defenders to locate raiders who are actively commiting hostile actions against them.
To say that this would be defeating the purpose of owning a veil sounds an awful lot like admitting that the real purpose of owning a veil is being able to attack people without any chance for them to fight back. If that's the case, then I think they should be deleted, but I don't think that's the case at all - I think being difficult to locate is useful for a lot more than being able to attack people without them being able to fight back if they don't have a veil or a friend with a veil and location request triggers.