How much more effort are we going to dump in to pvp development?

I can attest that Helvig & Arkah are roleplaying real experiences and this is not what I am talking about. Some of the stuff I have encountered gets really weird, really quick. Sometimes there is some sexually monstrous stuff. Imagine being asked to look at someone's newly decorated castle and you get invited into a hot tub by a prominent guild leader. Sexual innuendos become more frequent and you continue telling the guy you are not actually a female and he goes full blown Pepe Le Pew on you. You keep asking him to stop and it keeps getting worse and worse. This is just one of my roleplaying experiences that ended pretty gross has happened over 3 times as a female character. I feel so bad for the actual females in the game sometimes. It's so bad.

 

I hear you on that note. Most people here are adults and that type of behavior will happen. As long as its consensual I feel its ok. This pirate is not here for those kind of adventures. The pirate is here to tell stories, RP and start wars as often as possible. The intimate type encounters are not my thing. R/Boris

 

Brother, you could have at least shaved your legs for the photo *Grins*

 

im not a fan of the hot tub sex gatherings either and i stay far far away from them. Im supper happy to hear other people dislike them as much as i do ^^

 

Yes, there is a way. It's something we've been working on for a while. It's on the ever growing list of things to add to SotAssist. Also, thanks for the compliment, man. We are aiming to make it as handy as possible for every player, regardless of playstyle.

@Gorthyn PvP dance parties have actually happened. I've been to one of them. It was a blast.

 

That's because it's the bottom of the list. So, naturally they'd have the least amount of kills. They could be just learning, or letting friends kill them for bones. You'd have to ask each individual listed how they came to the score they have.

 

Oh, I'm going nowhere!
I'm here till they pull the plug on the server or when they scatter my ashes to the wind. Busy time of year for me through the summer, but we'll pull that together Boris!

 

There's another thing to consider, when trying to use the API to determine the number of PvPers. Those 142 on Hemswal's list are people that have actively made their names visible for public stats. Some don't know about this feature, and many others don't want to be visible. I've had a lot of PvP interactions with "anonymous" in the past. Not in April (actually surprised I even show up with a few deaths this season, I thought I did not PvP at all in April due to other things being more important to me the past weeks). Since "anonymous" people do not show up in the listing, the number of people that have in some way engaged in PvP should be very much bigger I think. And people that let their friends kill them for bones usually do not take the effort to enable their name for public stats.

I think I'm going to disable mine for now to avoid the shame of everyone seeing me on the bottom of the list and find someone that helps me "rethink my strategies"...

 

Brother; there is no rush to have the Paxlair RP. We can leave that one for September/October if it works better. I am looking for a POT that wishes to host one in late June in order to give @Chris time to deliver the larger groups/party option.

I had considered Kahli again but my extremely limited interaction with the occupants there and my “unorthodox” way of writing stories remains an obstacle for me. Only @Adam Crow accepts my RP style there so I will look somewhere else.

What I do and the stories I write have two purposes. I try to lure players that wish to bring their characters to life the opportunity to interact with the story. If they only want to write what happened in game it is fine. If they want to write to lead to an in game RP great. If this leads to an epic battle that brings the developers to give us tools to enhance our RP/PvP then I along with the others who joined me were successful.

So far we have had the “No Ransom” option and the upcoming larger groups as a result. If you want your town/city included, respect the RP story and my style of writing then let me know and if you cannot then I respect your wishes and will lead my RP stories somewhere else.

R/Boris/El Pirata/Black Sails Forever

P.S. @Dhanas , I will take you up on the PVP guidance soon

 

Sure, I am glad to help you.

 

Possible does not mean simple. And a lot of games have "special area" PvP but that doesn't mean it's good.

FFXI is one of those, they've got one area for PvP fights, and a team game area, but a class-based game is bad for 1v1 (warrior vs tank vs mage vs healer is hard to balance unless you do silly things like giving healers a bunch of DPS - and some games do that). And the team game, people stopped playing it early on, to the point where it only ever happens on the QA test server. Oh, and it also has a monster play thing which somehow can do PvP but it was so marginalized that I don't remember how it worked.

That one I specifically know is a "special area" PvP, monster vs non-monster. There's a big difference between a single PvP zone and PvP everywhere either opt-in or forced. I think making of a list of "look at how many games have PvP" without any qualification of whether it's fenced off in an arena or a tiny corner of the world is less than honest. I may have no interest in playing PvP but at least I can tell the difference.

No. The way I remember it, part of the agreement to get on Steam was that they can't release player counts. Which seems kind of presumptuous on the part of Steam, but there ya go. There's the steamcharts page, but it is only people who are using steam to play the game, and don't have their stats blocked. Since Steam is not the majority of users, and some prefer the native launcher, about all it's good for is a general trend, with the bias of being only Steam users that don't use the native launcher.

The only other way is in-game activity visible through the API or submitted vendor sale logs. Those still require some effort, not being anonymized, and don't report concurrent player counts.

 

It's pure speculation to say that "steam is not the majority of users"

Due to how many ways you can compute concurrent players, it is even pointless to guess so recklessly.

What you CAN say, is that the steam numbers have shown a significant decrease or insignificant change for each of the last 6 individual months.

 

That's an under-developed part of the game as well that I wouldn't want to discriminate against But of course I wouldn't know anything about that, but I can only imagine

The thing about SOTA is in it's diversification where everything is somewhere but isn't everything to be had within the game. That's nothing new to be said, but we can't disregard any sect of player base as being unworthy to try and please.

For instance; The idea of NPC children needing to be in the game and the need to have some reason to be able to kill them was once a forums ban'able subject when it was first brought up, because some people thought it was offensive, and now we have zombie kids to kill. The idea of playing the game as a kid or small character was thought to be a terrible addition which would take development away from both PvP as well as PvM. "I just bought my fairy belt at the add-on store, what a blast!" Was that a PvM or PvP enhancer? I don't know, but I do know it's fun and that you can fit allot more fairy people into a single hot tub

Another thing "hoped to be in future development" (hoped by me) is "Cannibalism" (definitely PvP related) My hopes are that Portalarium will allow us to play the role of a magical cannibal, magical because the cannibalistic player must eat their victims to remain alive strong an formidable, yet have the need to eat more and more in order not to begin degrading and becoming weak. That being said, that cannibal player would eventually not be able to eat enough and begin to degrade. Yet if any player or players were able to kill them, then reward would equal the cannibal's power.
That one isn't here yet and may never be, I just don't know. But everyone said the same about the kid thing too. Bah-Humbug!

The coming Siege SOTA Perilous;
Portalarium has always fit all it's SOTA pieces into the grand puzzle of things and also has constantly produced quality productions where nothing looks shabby and if it does, it won't stay that way. Building and laying siege sounds great and I can't wait to play in it, because normal dueling or small PvP just doesn't get my hair up. Yet this same style of gaming mech is the same needed for travelling Gypsy style temporary camping sights, so PvP development investment certainly does bring other PvM things with it. We may even see temporary play made Gypsy camp sights before we see the siege, we just don't know but these two ideas or developments are tied together. I'm not saying that there will ever be travelling style player made gypsy camps, but that was where some of the idea about the siege building first hatched out of through thoughts of fortifying such a camp sight.

Our game will always not compare well with big corporate budget ways of game development. We're crowd funded (said so much but always somehow forgotten when comparing SOTA with other games). "It's slow, it's always seemingly underfunded and seemingly behind schedule"

PvP does not take away from PvM and PvM does not take away from PvP. SOTA is like a department store or a big mall, it's got everything and whatever compartment or department you like to play in, it always seems disconnected from the other kids playing in another department or compartment within it, yet it is all one thing.

Just like Forest Gump, "that's all I have to say about that"
~Time Lord~

 

They may not have given any exact numbers, but they have said at various times that Steam accounts for 1/4 to 1/3 of players. That is most definitely not a majority.

 

You could summarize Steamcharts + SOTA launcher patch seeders

 

As I've already said, there are many ways to calculate active players, and an unknown form of counting players that produces an estimated fraction range at an unknown point in time is useless.

(Aside from the obvious source bias)

 

My name is Fionwyn Wyldemane in-game and I helped develop this game with bug reports, funding and community outreach. I am also DJ Sister Love and I do dance parties from time-to-time. When you used the term, "weapons-grade autism" to describe how you view dance parties, that makes it clear you are biased against them. To each their own, but just wow, how rude.

I have no idea who you are, never heard of you until this thread. Good on you for being here for so long. I'd pat you on the back, but you are doing a pretty good job yourself. Grats.

However, when you diss dance parties, you are also dissing a part of the community that never did a thing to hurt anyone. I do dance parties as a way to bring community together, not tear it down as you seem to be so good at doing. Mad skillz there, I'll give you that.

As for PvP - I am not a PvPer. Never have been, never will be. But I had the best time PvPing in Luna City for the "Black Sails Saga". I had my butt handed to me repeatedly and didn't care in the least. It was fun and I appreciate all the effort that went into putting it together.

I hope that PvPers get more love. I also hope that whatever "disgust" you feel about dance parties in the game can be taken care of by some weapons grade Pepto Bismal. Because dance parties are here to stay.