Hide Your Valuables (In Chests!)

[Balkoth]

Woo-hoo! You're all asleep so I have hours to fill this in with the proper text! Organizational stuff!

[Balkoth]

Except apparently I can't edit the previous post at all. Joy. I think this has been noted several times by more than just myself -- is there a reason that's disabled?

This subject (chests) has been discussed before and I'm not sure any firm conclusion was reached.

There are a few basic problems here.

1, right now apparently all chests require 26 or so DC to open. Which means any character by level 10 can open them, more or less. Thus this ceases to be any kind of meaningful "advantage" or "bonus" for a rogue character AND also seems really weird since everyone is expected to be able to open them. "Yeah, I'm a holy paladin of Tyr, god justice...duh I can pick locks."

2, on the flip side, many characters prior to 10 or so cannot open those locks without buying Dex gear or lockpicks...yet apparently they're expected to do so in order to get things like Mind Spell immunity prior to the Forge. The chests also seem to be the main source of Haste potions.

3, making it so the DC of chests scale up in level results in two odd results. One, people who need the items from those chests due to lacking mind spell immunity or haste cannot open the locks in higher zones. Two, they therefore need to return to low level zones to open those easy chests.

I'm just not sure what the goal here is. The fact that there's basically no dropped loot compounds the problem -- if 80% of the stuff dropped normally (or was found in unlocked chests) and rogue characters could open some locked chests for bonus loot (25% more overall) then it wouldn't be an issue. But when 95% or more of stuff is in the chests...

[tarashon]

Howdy balkoth

Oki; time for an overall explanation of the generel idea back then and now aswell and then we can ahve a look at "what to do"...

As you know ( to some degree atleast ) some of the absolute priorities when I started to build Xymoria which later on became Seeker's and my project "Alanagara - where Gods are born" were ballance isues. I was personally overly sick&tired of servers where 90% of the attention and ballancing were granted to so-called "powerbuilds". Basically normal players were "da sheit" and powergamers ( and back then also PKers, there seemed to be a strange connection betwen the type of players at the time ) ruled the World.

So in order to make some sort of World where all were challenged but also needed we tried various aproaches typically controlled or administrered via items rather than nerfs. One of the way to make fx melee classes need casters would be the lack of permanent haste and mind-immunity items. One way to make the rogue needed would be to make him/her be able to get such items for the group. At the same time we felt that it should be possible to get this for melee classes also just not endless suplies ( rogues/bards have access to buying these things in their secret guild.... )

So now you know what the generel concept/intention is and as such that concept and intention remains the drive core of this server all shall remain doing so likely..always.

I suppose one way of rethinking this would be to implement a lootscript of our own - ie tweak our deathscript to such a point where certain Things like these potions have a small chance of dropping but the chests get DC depending on their area. That way the high PL you have the more area you can get extra loot and if not you still have some random access to these potions.

As you also know from previous posts we can also allocate specific random drops to specific mobs but going over all our mobs to put 6 extra variable sets ie 12 variables kist for a random chance of potions is simply too much Work for too little output - atleast for now.

Well this is something for Seeker to look into and comment on since he is Scripter an I am not, so tha ball is in his corner now i suppose.

And just for clarification we did not purposely just make these potions available in normal stores since then it would merely be a question of money and not availabilty.

/tara

[Somnium]

I suppose one way of rethinking this would be to implement a lootscript of our own - ie tweak our deathscript to such a point where certain Things like these potions have a small chance of dropping but the chests get DC depending on their area. That way the high PL you have the more area you can get extra loot and if not you still have some random access to these potions.

As you also know from previous posts we can also allocate specific random drops to specific mobs but going over all our mobs to put 6 extra variable sets ie 12 variables kist for a random chance of potions is simply too much Work for too little output - atleast for now.

Well this is something for Seeker to look into and comment on since he is Scripter an I am not, so tha ball is in his corner now i suppose.

I do have a couple of ideas, with a different amount of flexibility vs. workload impact I'll contact you when I am back home.

Except apparently I can't edit the previous post at all. Joy. I think this has been noted several times by more than just myself -- is there a reason that's disabled?

Well, not disabled, but limited to a few minutes (as a "grace period" for fixing spelling errors). There are two reasons that I default all forums I create to use this setting:

• To preserve the "conversational" nature of a discussion thread. I find that the points made during a discussion can often be just as interesting as the conclusion.
• Guidelines from the Danish "Datatilsynet" (regulatory agency responsible for enforcing the rules regulating how companies and other entities can use personal information). The guidelines for forums state, that allowing people to freely edit/delete their posts, can be interpreted as users being able to request deletion of all the posts they have made (as opposed to merely anonymizing them). This can be rather disruptive for an online community (for instance resulting in incomprehensible discussion threads).

That's the explanation - though I do see how this setting is an inconvenience in your specific case