Where There IS A Will There is a Way

Where There IS A Will There IS a Way​

At birth there is joy, laughter and great merriment.
At birth there seems to be a promise that years will lie ahead while dreams are formed. At birth the tentacles of the dreams reach toward the heavens and bloom into reality.

At each birth the blooms of life grow into expectant Hope.

The years grow into winter then spring and on into the heat of summer and into the bright leaves in Fall.

Then again the circle of life makes her round as death blankets the earth with cleansing snow.

The miracle of birth sprouts into expectant Hope. The circle of life once again completes her journey .

Our game called Shroud of the Avatar came about at its birth some years ago. It has made her round several times during these past years witnessing players coming and players going.
We will be walking into a new journey very soon with many expectations and very high hopes.

My greatest desire is for all of us to work toward a common goal of making Shroud of the Avatar the greatest game any one has ever played. The years will go by whether we sit and watch the game or whether we reach out and take the bloom before our eyes and help it to grow to be what it is meant to be.

When we are born and when we bloom into the hope called life we are given two choices.

1. We can quit when we face an obstacle or when our hearts are hurting because
we feel the sting of what we consider failure.

2. We can instead realize that the obstacle just pushed us into finding another way to go
toward the hope of our dream.

When I went to the University my dream was to be a concert pianist. Due to always being so nervous that it seemed my mind quit functioning to the point of freezing in place I learned to instead of practicing the piano 3 or so hours a day I practiced 12 or more hours every day. I became good enough that others would tell me "I could not do that because I get too scared to play for others....you just don't know what it is like to have that kind of nervousness." I smiled for I certainly understood. So others never realized that the fear I felt was not just in playing for others but in every part of my life. The feeling of failure and often wanting to quit even talking to another person is never easy to handle. BUT! I had a dream of being able to talk with others without shaking and later to play the piano in concerts. I have never totally conquered that. However, I wanted to learn how to succeed so it was not an option to quit.

Due to a physical nerve problem I no longer can play but looking back the dream of giving concerts was met often and the joy of giving to others still brings tears to my eyes for I realize that although the hope, the dream was not like I first wanted it to be but it was not a failure. Joy always came when I would look out and see the faces that listened to the music.
The dream did not fail.
The dream just changed and became what it was meant to be.

There are many parts to this great game. All the parts make it whole. All the parts can be made great or mediocre. Yesterday we had a PVP Event in Blood Bay. I was given GM power to have the event live in our game to test two things: The working of the GM powers as the guinea pig of the abilities and testing the NO LOOT experiment.

Hemswal Genis was given GM power last week as well and since I am in his guild
he offered to conduct the various GM commands during the event .
He even was able to summon an ancient dragon to cause havoc on our event....great fun!
It is working so far and was a great test.

Atos will look at the data and see the areas that need continued work.

We had the opportunity not only to have a great time meeting the challenge of
fighting a thinking, living being all the while having a great time in the battle.
There was much death. There was noise and chaos as we made an effort to figure out how to live
longer than 30 seconds. There were some playing the bad guys and some playing the good guys.

There were some who tried out PVP for the first time and some
who have been learning how to PVP for awhile now.
We know that in real life without consequences there is anarchy and lawlessness. Without boundries children grow up selfish with an attitude that others owe them something.

Without clear understanding of rules in war we have societies that provide a way for criminals to glory in the ways of evil. We need a clear understanding of the rules of PVP so we can glory in the challenge of sparing with the human mind that that has integrity.

The chance we had yesterday to cause others to want to try PVP in this
game was met by many with crossed arms. Chaos and dis regard for others was rampid across the land in Blood Bay. Instead of participating with justice mercy and fairness many were killed given no chance to resurrect and continue in the battle. They were killed over and over and over again.

Some, however, knew they could kill the other player but chose to not resurrection kill. They chose to be evil but with fairness. They chose to be good yet again with fairness.
Just as it is in any game or contest in real life when there is no fairness in the competition the unfair person will soon find he is out of the game no longer being asked to play.

Yesterday we had the opportunity of all of us working together to bring the world of PVP together with PVE. We had the opportunity to learn that each activity could be loved and satisfying
in all ways so that each would look forward in participating.
We will find solutions for each problem.

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. He said
"I did not fail, I just found 10,000 ways it would not work."

So this could be with the ganking of others at the resurrection ankh.
We must find a way to stop this practice.

The sure way to fail is to destroy it.

The sure way to not have PVP is to destroy it.

We want PVP to be enjoyed so we must find ways to bring desire in others to PVP.
If we do not find a way to correct the idea that killing in any fashion
is the only goal PVP will fail.

PVP not being played is not PVP at all. If PVP becomes an activity and excuse to be abusive
it will then be the activity of only a few not because of great and skilled PVP persons
but because those truly great and skilled PVP players chose to did not want anyone else to become even half as good as they think themselves to be.

I do not know if many of the ones who came yesterday to see what PVP is all about will try it again.

There will be some of us who want there to be rules that all will abide.
We want PVP to flourish.

I want fun. However, I also want you to have fun.
There is a ground where both can be achieved. There is a ground where we will have great PVP.

Our story will go forward. We will find the solutions to these problems.
We have a great game right now.
It will become even greater in the coming years.
We will not fail. We will succeed.

Anything worth doing is worth the effort to understand and plan and then to do it.

Look for The Black Sail as we sail the seas. Be ready to fight and play with honor.

As years continue to move the story forward our Pirate Story will become stronger as we get ready to sail toward Ep. 2.

Please, come sail with us.


​

 

Reading this, I couldn't help but think of Morpheus's speech to Zion

 

Can you just summarize the wall of text?

 

Rough Summary:

• Common goals
• Work together
• Hug it out

Catherine Rose was given GM powers at player made PvP event in Blood Bay to test:-

1. GM power abilities
2. No Loot

Hemswal Genis was given GM powers last week and offered to conduct commands, so he:-

1. Summoned and ancient dragon

Atos will look at data from those events

CatherineRoses PvP observations:-

• Some tried PvP for first time
• There where vet PvPers
• Need for clarifying rules of PvP
• Wanted ‘fair’ PvP behaviour from all players
• Believes everyone who wants to PvP should do so with fairness and respect
• Doesn’t like that some only wanted to gank/spawn squat at resurrection ankh
• Any not playing by the ‘rules’ should be ostracised

tldr: They want ganking at Resurrection Ankh’s to be prevented and clarification of what the rules of PvP are.

(Thats how it read to me. If that’s not what CatherineRose wanted to get across I’m sure they will clarify.)

 

Awesome event, nice to partecipate. Thank Catherine and everybody else for the fun.

 

Since you don't list your location I assume you don't read U.S. English?

 

It is badly formatted, huge wall of text.
Imagine someone with color blindness trying to parse that. Imagine someone reading that, at all.
I did not, so the TL; DR; was great.

Disclaimer: Opinion not about OP. Just the text, nothing but the text is the target here

 

After resurrecting at an ankh, there should be no way to be targeted until you move yourself away from the ankh.

Some players need to apply buffs or switch decks/equipment before they are ready to fight again.

I would love a list of players names that partake in this tactic. If you know of anyone specifically, please send me a pm with their characters name.

I wish I would have been able to attend the event, but I was watching my twins while my wife went xmas shopping with here mom & sisters.

 

There should be a safety zone where folks can rez and not get ganked rez killed. That has always been the issue with pvp. But i guess that is hard to do in a player owned town. There is no way to make a distinct area for rezzing and be safe . But then there is also the other hand. Cannot sit in the safe zone all the time . So i guess a timer for the safe zone would work. But again with doing these things in POTs its hard to set up designated areas.

 

I've always wondered why the ankhs found in PvP zones are regular ankhs and not chaos ankhs. Even non-PvP zones should have a few chaos ankhs around to reduce this kind of senseless slaughter ad nauseum.

Maybe the GM can be given the ability to add a few chaos ankhs in strategic places within the RPG location.

 

It should just be wherever you are resurrected. Whether it's an ankh or resurrected by a player. Once you move you would become targetable again. But until then you should be able to buff etc without being targeted. Designated areas are not needed.

 

I'm not sure what "US English" has to do with anything... I'm born & raised in the US, took numerous English classes in college (my wife was an English major, and I took a lot of her classes), read what was written, found it severely lacking grammatically in multiple instances, and overall it gave me a headache just trying to parse what was being written.

 

@Mishikal you are right. I re-read my post with what you said in mind. Next time I hope to write my thoughts better. Thank you.

 

Agreed, more chaos ankhs needed EVERYWHERE. Or allow a choice?

 

@ Fister Magee that will be done.

 

I think you had good points overall, btw. It was just difficult to get to them.

 

I readeth English v'ry well, just pref'r fusty English. Foreberan Blandenfeax Englisc???

 

Re: Res Killing. I did complain about it going on, I'm sure my comments made it to Fzol's livestream. After thinking it over, almost all the ankhs were located on either side of the beach, and thus easy to be auto-targeted by a stray shot.

And in retrospect, I'll never be completely sure as the cameraman (with my interface down) if all the times I died was because I was intentionally being rez killed, or I was just in the line of fire, or what. But there were several places where it could have been accidental -- and one case where someone might have killed me for being a pushy cameraman.

No harm done except that its clear there wasn't a lot of balance to the overall situation. This has always been an issue dating back to UO. I'm an aggressive problem solver, and will likely make suggestions in the future that will significantly favor non-PvP types to win these events. As the PvP people will agree, balance is important for the game to be fun. I have always believed that if people want a valuable reward, they should work their butts off for it, and risk/reward needs to be considered. There isn't much risk in 8 PvP experts vs 8 non-PvP types, therefore the reward should be small. If the arrangement was 8 PvP types vs 100 non-PvP types, the reward should be more significant- - provided they win.

I seem to recall this was "the Dream" of many players back at Persistence, anyway. I don't think anything is new here. Except that we have a lack of participants overall and need to get the numbers of players up. And I do believe its a matter of all parties (Catnip/PvP/Non-PvP) to dream up ways to make these events more fun for everyone. At this point, I'm looking at the regular flagged PvP zones and wondering if any of them were intentionally designed for group combat that players can leverage.

 

It seems like overall things it was a positive experience, except for the ...

Honestly, there's always going to be the handful of bad apples in any game that allows this to happen - it will happen. The perpetrators argue "well, the game lets me so its okay, I'm anti-virtue, I'm evil, this is fine." And they're right - its a completely legitimate thing to do, but the consequences are that people think PvP is full of jerks and avoid it completely. Not good for growing PvP.

I'm glad to say that I find the majority of the folks who enjoy PvP in Sota are not like this, though I admit my main hesitation to participate is because of this sort of behavior, I haven't the patience for it, it simply makes things tedious and not-fun and I see no reason to log onto a game to have 'fun' and just be harassed/griefed. The reality is that there are some people who can only have fun by ruining someone else's, and well, those people are entitled to have fun too, so we're kind of stuck until the pvp systems can expand beyond "kill defenseless target" stage and get some actual objectives/content, although even that wont eliminate completely people who just need to ruin things because they can. Trying to police it or restrict it usually ends up putting far too many restrictions on "fair" pvp, too. Although some of the suggestions above (ie, can't be attacked until you move after rez) would alleviate it somewhat.

 

@kaeshiva I completely and with my whole heart agree with you. You want our game to be fun and played with joy whether you are the bad guy or you are the good guy. The game, just like in any good movie or any good book, needs both sides to be fun to read or watch or participate. We will find the answer to the problems with our game's PVP . There are many more people like you, like @Fzol who love this game and work daily to work toward making it fun for all players, the beginners and the experienced. Most all who play want not only themselves to have fun but they want the other person to have fun as well. I am very grateful that that is the case.

The way to correct any problem we have in life is to look at the problem not with desire to tear it apart but with ideas to find solutions.

Also, I am so very grateful to @Atos for not just purchasing the game but for wanting to hear the needs of the game without the pride in his heart saying "I will do it only my way." He has shown he too loves the work of the game and wants it to be fun for everyone. So we will continue. So Atos will continue. So will the various opinions about the game continue . We have a great game now but when life of the game comes to a close and we look back we will see Shroud of the Avatar was not just a game but a great game!