( ONGOING ) My experience so far.

[tarashon]

Howdy Balkoth and some interesting points there

First of with the warning signs.. Warning signs are there only when they make sense. And making sense is when there is an "unproportional leap" from area A to area B.

As for the chests you infact have a point in which I agree to the point that i seriously thought about it and considered a possible change when I wrote the comment. The point being that perhaps those chests, and all others, should indeed have a DC matching the level of the area, even if its a common chest of random potions - this would make the rogue/bard/dedikated lockpicker get more loot indeed....

As for the point of fear aura vs "deathfield" or whatever, there ARE items in game and can be made in the custom forge granting fear immunity, there are many spells granting that and there are potions granting that. Perhaps you die first time to a given mob to find out something but really I find that a positive trait for a server, not negative. Perhaps you feel a good server means your character never have to die, but I disagree, and the fact that you have died 3 times ?? in cases that did not involve flaws in our spellsystem, really to me is an absolute minimum for someone as explorative as you. I dont mean this negatively i mean it positively. You dare explore and you pretty much never die from it, IMHO. So basically I hear your ligit point but disagree completely that there is a problem so in the sense of our monsters being too terrible or that we should have , in my opion, redicously amount of signs and warning every 20 meter ingame to warn the player that NOW the monster shift is just too much "kindergarden nursing" for my likeing. It might very well be that many disagree here or that our server is to be considered "rough" on this isue but nothing there I will even remotely consider changing.

As for your point about different mobs is better you have a point in that new landscapes are interesting. However designing new landscapes and monster for the players to feel the change cvomes with a Price. I have seen servers boosting of 1000+ areas and they have 1000s of different mobs. sure they have but i have also seen the Building quality of some servers around and if anyone prefere a zone of that quality and 1000 different types of mobs then truly one should choose such servers. However I am confident that you as a fellow designer have a concept of the MASSIVE amount of time that has gone into designing the areas in "Alangara - New Dawn" compared to such "Oh let me place a tree and a tileset Boulder and VUPTI. area 798 is in game" areas/designs. As such the time and energy required means we prefere rather to spend more time in the same area of some quality than makes tons of medricore variations.

One problem, or challenge, we suffer is undoubtly an lack of players. This means we are all more restricted since a party can overcome far more and thus our range of area choises goes up. At your level there are infact severel quests, bosses, areas to visit that you apearently havent yet encountered or can't be in alone due to lack of Company. That is sad and we are currently trying to address the isue, but this challenge is rough becourse basically we have to "mold" or "diverse" the module from being an multiplayer PW, into something much more "singleplayer module like", WHILE at the same time not making it so easy it ruins the PW fun totally. These are ballance isues that are tough to perfect. As for right now fx, an intire complex with severel quest, being advertised in both books and the museum actually, ( you apear to have missed ) is actually being upgraded in level to cater to Groups 11+ since with the adition of new quests in Castle Balder people would get too high level for the zone to be challenging for 3+ players together. So to cater to fun in Groups we are changing some Things around and singleplayers might have to suffers some more grinding to fx get the levels or gear needed. you can fx do the farm and fishing related quests and Thus also gain access to the forge will will infact offer you, VERY CHEAP immunities to both fear and paralysis, as the two main monsterpowers in mention.

* Will continue but post now out of fear it will all disapear *

As for your specific points with damage and armor you have apearently met a "stale point" ( or whatever itsw called in English ) at this time, that is mainly due to the fact that you play alone ( on that character ). The forge - which is fixed by the way, and you can get a reimbursement from the 4 sonic damage if you want - will allow you to make weapons of way more destructive nature. there is right now ingame DROPS specifically for melee classes that can make you FOR FREE imbue any given melee weapon with 2d12 electrical damage but making it also only useable by melee classes. etc etc. There are also free drop weapons of other types of damage that can then again be combined with beforementioned powers. If you have a bard level 10+ with you he would likely give you around 1d10 extra sonic damage on your weapons, and any mage or priest with you would give you flame weapon or fire whatever both giving 2d12 firedamage from level 1. All in all you can easely see that the server allows for a MASSIVELY heavier damage output, and had there been more players you would have had it. the same goes for you armor, and as a melee there is powerfull items to be found for free or created in the forge. Again you really just hit a spot where it requires some grinding since you dont have other players around to help you - which is indeed annoying but something we can't do much about

I hope this answers your questions, but in all generellity one major isue is the lack of players making it either harder for singleplayers or we downgrade everything and make it dropdead ludicrously easy for Groups. Ballancing a PW is not easy but from massive feedback over severel years of running "back then" we know that we actually have a composition that is not too shabby at all. Everything can be improved but also all factors must be put into the equation and fx the customforge and the fact that with more players help will be given between them making things easier and ballance diffently.

/tara

[Balkoth]

As for the chests you infact have a point in which I agree to the point that i seriously thought about it and considered a possible change when I wrote the comment. The point being that perhaps those chests, and all others, should indeed have a DC matching the level of the area, even if its a common chest of random potions - this would make the rogue/bard/dedikated lockpicker get more loot indeed....

Yeah, like I said it just seems odd to expect everyone -- from Paladin to Druid to Sorcerer -- to be able to pick locks in order to be able to get most loot. Giving dedicated lockpickers some bonus loot seems entirely fine as long as everyone else is still getting a reasonable amount too.

there are potions granting that. Perhaps you die first time to a given mob to find out something but really I find that a positive trait for a server, not negative.

Fear immunity on items (which is only one item I've found so far and it's not like you have a bunch of forge tokens at the point we're discussing) doesn't help versus things like Confusion, Stuns, and Paralysis.

And yes, you can use potions of Clarity. That's also pretty awful -- if I want to adventure for an hour then I need *60* Clarity potions and I have to drink one per minute (more if I get dispelled). Then I have to *individually* buy 60 more Clarity potions. That also sucks. Which means that between drinking the Clarity potions and buying the Clarity potions I'm spending more than 6 minutes out of every 60 on that. Over 10% of my playtime simply trying to not lose complete control over my character.

Here's a perfectly fine scenario:

"Huh, that Imp feared me, which means I lost AB, AC, take more damage, and have spell failure. I can't fight effectively, I should probably run away in to live and I need something to protect me against that effect to win here."

You learn that the Imp has a fear aura and you run away because you're scared.

Here's what's not fun:

"Huh, that Imp feared me, I guess my character should decide to run into the nearest wall and stand there until he dies."

See the difference?

Perhaps you feel a good server means your character never have to die, but I disagree, and the fact that you have died 3 times ?? in cases that did not involve flaws in our spellsystem, really to me is an absolute minimum for someone as explorative as you.

Good:

"Huh. This ogre I found in this new zone is really tough and I think I'm going to lose if I keep fighting. I should probably try to run away and come back later."

Good:

"Huh. This ogre I found in this new zone is really tough -- I managed to barely win but the next group is FOUR of them! I'd die if I continued, I should retreat and come back later."

Bad:

"Oh, that ogre hit me with a no save paralysis bolt. I guess I'll just sit here with no control over my character and watch as the ogre walks over and kills me."

It's the loss of control over your character and inability to try to retreat that bothers me. Part of the problem is the lack of challenge rating on the mobs -- upon entering an area I can't tell if those are mobs meant for level 10 or level 20 if I'm a level 12 character.

As for your point about different mobs is better you have a point in that new landscapes are interesting.

You could even just use the current zones and just add more mob variety with multiple quests. Like Talkash Stalkers occupy the southern half of a forest zone while Talkash Jaguars occupy the northern half with a quest for each.

As for right now fx, an intire complex with severel quest, being advertised in both books and the museum actually, ( you apear to have missed )

I guess? I specifically read through the three "news" pamphlets to see if they suggested new quests/areas but they didn't. I suppose I assumed the books were just to be solely lore stuff or for general advice.

you can fx do the farm and fishing related quests and Thus also gain access to the forge will will infact offer you, VERY CHEAP immunities to both fear and paralysis, as the two main monsterpowers in mention.

Paralysis costs 3 Forge Tokens it says for me?

Not to mention I have no idea what gear I should be expecting to use for a while or how fast I'll be able to get Forge Tokens. And, naturally, the gear I *think* I'll be using longer (like the bracers) already have 4+ properties (2 Str/2 Con/2 Regen/2 Fort).

If you have a bard level 10+ with you he would likely give you around 1d10 extra sonic damage on your weapons, and any mage or priest with you would give you flame weapon or fire whatever both giving 2d12 firedamage from level 1. All in all you can easely see that the server allows for a MASSIVELY heavier damage output, and had there been more players you would have had it.

Bards give Positive Energy damage with their song, I believe?

And yes, Flame Weapon and Darkfire are nuts.

the same goes for you armor, and as a melee there is powerfull items to be found for free or created in the forge. Again you really just hit a spot where it requires some grinding since you dont have other players around to help you - which is indeed annoying but something we can't do much about

Part of the problem was that I thought you could only add 1 AC to items -- because of that conversation bug. Which is really annoying. Knowing that I can actually enchant stuff up to 5 AC helps.

I hope this answers your questions, but in all generellity one major isue is the lack of players making it either harder for singleplayers or we downgrade everything and make it dropdead ludicrously easy for Groups.

Or have some easier but longer things for single players. Like a group could go kill a boss that's meant for 4+ people and everyone gets 6 Forge Tokens in an hour. Or...a single player can grind out mobs for an hour in a solo zone and earn 2 Forge Tokens from it.

I have no idea how quickly people should expect to get Forge tokens so take that as a concept and not concrete numbers.

[tarashon]

Forgetokens is buyable but requires 5 Tukarian Cherries each ( + 150000 gold )

Having done all druidquests for cherrie seeds you get 5 trees which respawns cherries once an hour Real Life ( i believe , can check timer ).

/tara

[tarashon]

Oki, home from job now so have some more time to actually reply to your post Balkoth.

From what i understand from severel of your posts one thing that truly vexes you are the mental attackforms of some mobs. More particularly the Fear and the Paralysation. WHereas I can apreciate the frustration I should clarify a few things and then explain why this will not change.

Firest and foremost the forge ( from level 10+ ) can give you immunity to fear and immunity to paralysation. Both attackforms can over time be totally "dealth with" for all classes.

Secondly and more importantly these attackforms are there for a very vital reason. Melee characters excells versus melee monsters and are weak against mental ones. Now we try to amke something lethal and feared for all classes and I find it a very lacking server if we dont try to challenge the melee where they are weakest. Imagine the chorus of complaints should casters start to argue for the blatant unfairness of how easy all the monsters kill them, compared to the melee classes once they get within combat range...

Another thing is various casters have various spells against these types of attack and if they are not ingame we would indeed indirectly "nerf" all casterclasses, more than they allready are considered our monsterbase's overall immunities or resists to both mental and death magics.

As for mindeffecting the lowlevel chests scattered all over the server have "Potions of Mental Fortress" which offers mindeffecting FAR longer than your clarity potions. ALso the spell clarity have had its duration doubled so even semicasters like bards can actually extend it and have it function for a fair amount of time.

All in all these attack types are easely dealth with for a minor diverse Group, someone spending time on forging items ( must be level 10+ admitably ) and in severel cases from "farming" the ancient treasure chests all over the server.

As for warnig signs i must say that my own opinion is "enough is enough". By that i mean i feel a server can simply become uttely dull when everything that is lethal must be warned and signed. This is a PW and one of the special things about it compared to a module is that it is not nescesarely A to B to C to D etc. We want to give players the feel of a World that is vibrant and where they themselves needs to be carefull. Your point about always scaling to make it possible to avoid death is fair enough but in reality it would mean removing all specialpowers and spells from all monsters since these are ultimately always deadly and "unfair" to the melee classes that dont have access to spells besides from items/potions. The fair follow up on such an action was to nerf all monsters melee ability since they clearly wreck havoc upon the casters where melee classes can litterally complain about being bored and AFK...

In a singleplayer module with fixed encounter you can scale things fairly precisely but in an open PW you either can't or if you can we will not spend so much time on it, since we litterelly feels it destroys the server and the excitement far more than it benefits anyone.

There is ONE obvious way to have a certain impact on these things though. other players have in the past made fauna books etc for the Library and if you feel this is a huge isue you COULD make such books. That way you will also "immortalise" whatever chosen PC or NAME you prefere on the server. We will however ( likely me ) read the books closely for quest-revealing-spoiler-allerts and such, but other than that it is all good and dandy

You might ask why we would allow "spoiler books" in the library and not take action or prevent it ingame but the answer to that is simply. Custom playermade books is an treasured part of player interaction and is thus welcomed in its own regard. Secondly such information requires participation and dedication from the players and as such is not "nursing the World to death" with removing anything that is not a scaled, graduate climb in fysical damage output...

I hope this explains the whole "special power attack" thoroughly and our view upon it, and if not atleast more clearly than i have so far

/tara

[Balkoth]

Having done all druidquests for cherrie seeds you get 5 trees which respawns cherries once an hour Real Life ( i believe , can check timer ).

Will respond more later, but on this matter I would *strongly* suggest allowing more than one cherry to appear over time. Aka, if it's one cherry per hour by default...then if I check eight hours later I can collect eight cherries. Feeling like you have to check the tree every hour (or you "lose" cherries) is going to make it feel very much like Farmville which I suspect will turn a lot of players off from the server. World of Warcraft is currently catching a lot of flak for aspects of its "Garrison" feature -- basically your own fort with stuff you can do...but by the time you finish dealing with it each day (and often feeling like you need to do it several times per day) many people don't feel like doing anything else in-game.

That said, it's likely that people obtaining 24 cherries per day might be a bit more than you want so you may want to reduce it to spawning one cherry per four hours or something (six per day if that's what you expect players to get). Can even cap it at a certain number (meaning you need to check it at least every three days or every week or something -- can't let it build up for a month of not playing).

[tarashon]

Howdy Balkoth

Well at first i allmost got a shock about the cherries and the farmville comparison - As in really a shock !
I would thoroughly hate if "Alangara - new Dawn" felt anyway like those kind of browsergames, I really truely utterly would...

So next I started to wonder if I had ever felt like that or people in generel had been talking about this as a problem, and as far as I can recall it have never been a problem... Then I started to think about it and why it perhaps were, or were not a problem...

The thing is that those Tukarian Cherries also goes along with gold to make either Forge Tokens or Powerstones. So in reality ( except for the new potion recipees for those special healing potions ) you can't use the cherries alone. Thus It is really ballanced nice enough in the sense that usually when people have their farm they start to "farm it" when they login, and usually between adventurers a trip to the farm is standard - as it also is for myself now...

So really except for perhaps in the very beginning ( asuming you had a huge gold reserve when getting the farm which basically noone does ) the ballance between output and need is fine as it is. It is NOT farmville !

What you could argue is that people loggin in all over the day will indeed get more but then again this is an online server and those people playing more on it should obviously get more than those playing little. Even if some people tend to get on and off or perhaps stay online while watching TV to semi-afk tend their farm still is there in some way and other players typically can get in touch with them within a certain amount of time. If we make it like you suggest then the current system with potions will mean that when you login seldom you get lots of resources for healing potions which I dont think is a good idea. That woud be kind of a "welcome back bonus" some FTP online mmorgs have, and I dont like it for us.

If anything one could argue that one should atually be on the farmground to activate a timer but then again I don't personally find farming THAT fun, so we have stick with this model where farming as such takes between 1 and 2 minuttes and then you can return to RP, questing, adventuring or whatever makes your day.

/tara

[Balkoth]

So really except for perhaps in the very beginning ( asuming you had a huge gold reserve when getting the farm which basically noone does ) the ballance between output and need is fine as it is. It is NOT farmville !

Went and tested this briefly. Spent 38 minutes farming some mobs and exploring a new area. Despite dying twice and wandering around a lot I wound up still making a profit of 31.5k gold in those 38 minutes.

So with not dying and not exploring I could easily have gotten 60k per hour. And I'm only level 13 still. In other words, even if I had 5 cherry trees, I could make enough gold to fund four Forge tokens in an hour...whereas it would take 4 hours of checking for the cherries.

[tarashon]

Well seemes you make more money than I would ahve expected. Just the same the ballance of need for tokens have worked quite well over the years. Another aspect is that if we use your model effectively you want to completely remove the function of the cherries.

( should be noted that the goldscale have been upped since the player ran abck there, with more drops on some mobs and the intire "xp *2 amount of gold per mob" included now also. Also quests have been upped in gold and XP so this might be why you simply get golds faster now )

A: Getting them so fast we might as well remove them alltogther.

B: Making the new recipee for special healpotions ballance ruining in the sense that people will drown in those potions allmost removing the need for a cleric/druid for heals.

C: Remove any transactions between players selling cherries/tokens to eachother.

So in effect your point is valid but presents other problems we wont "suffer".

Finally if you can farm so fast as you say it also means that one day of masterfarming could also allmost upgrade all your gear. We strongly prefere it to not be so "instant" and thus the tokens/cherries delays things abit. As I wrote earlier we have never experienced any problems with this, so we will keep things as they are for now; in regards of the Tukarian Cherries anyways.

PS.

I have been considering for some time to make Forge Tokens buyable directly at Arons Wonders for perhaps 25k or something. ANyways the Price should be substantially higher than 15,000 since that means its worth using the usual system OR buying from other players - Havent really reached any conclusions so far.

/tara

[Li'l Rose]

Ok, I have run into a little problem about trying to remember the quests. I finished both of Ralfe's quests, and now I need to do Jorgen's quest. However I spoke to Jorgen long ago while exploring the city, and I have forgotten what he told me. Now when I try to talk to him, he just look at me, and not say anything. I could not find the quests listed on the forum or in the journal, so I guess I am stuck for now. I noticed that Ralfe and the golem both kept repeating their quests until I completed them, but Jorgen does not. Was this intentional, or did I find a bug?

Thanks for any help.

[tarashon]

Hi Li'l Rose

Hmm i guess there is a sort of "dialog choice bug" when you describe the scenario like that. never heard of it before but I can look into it

For now to recap the quest "Jorgen the Skinner" in "The heroes' Rest Inn" wants you to kill ralpha the ratcatcher Down in the normal sewers under Castle Balder and get his flute if i recall right. Regardless the entrance to the city sewers is located in Little park where you also have the Chauntea temple.

Remember to get either rod of the ghost or the lke to protect yourself from magical missiles from the ratmen mystics

Enjoy!

/tara