Bro, do you even Role Play???

I foresee a virtual cap, where each subsequent skill point requires more XP than the last. If the first skill point costs 1 XP, and each subsequent skill point costs double the XP as the previous one, it doesn't take long before the amount of XP required for your next skill points exceeds the time left in your life. I don't recommend that steep a curve, but the principle holds. Invest your XP wisely.

You don't know that. It wasn't true in UO Siege Perilous and I don't think it will be true in SotA either. You are just afraid that will be the case. Lets see how it works out in practice.

I think we are. Given the points I've made above, where do we significantly differ?

If they don't, they don't. But not supporting Full Loot will guarantee they won't.

R8, R9, and R10 will be largely devoted to PvP. I don't think that was originally planned. PvP threads spanning hundreds of pages convinced the devs that PvP was important to their paying customers. If their paying customers want a full loot option, it behooves us to discuss it thoroughly, and exchange as many ideas as we can, fleshing that idea out as thoroughly as the community suggested PvP options.

That is the way to convince the devs that maybe, just maybe, full loot will work as an option in SotA.

 

I would have thought that would have been obvious.

 

Are you talking to Rune, or to me?

 

You cannot align UO's success with Trammel, there are numerous other factors that increased the player base around the time Trammel was introduced.

Remember MMOs were a niche game once too.

This argument has gone completely circular, I see people making good points but the same old 3 cherry picking quotes then throwing in their own red herring to "prove" their point.

Simple fact is its not Non Consensual/Looting Player interaction that makes or breaks a game. Unfortunately it was WOW that took the EQ model and made MMOs mainstream and this is why we have themepark games and not sandbox.

EVE may be in decline but its only natural after 10 years. And it has always struggled to get new players not because of the PvP nature of the game but the presumed idea that you could never get stronger than the vets, the diffilculty in learning the game and the time required. All of these have been addressed. How many MMOS get a run like that?

Looting and PKing should have ramifications, yes there should be a burden system, yes there should be TRUE risk vs reward. Like Owain said, its in our interest to thoroughly discuss aspects of PvP and looting so we get the coverage we deserve so the developers take note and can mash together a system ALL players can enjoy

I want a RG game not a themepark and I hope we get it.

 

I don't think anyone arguing against full loot and the problems it brings want a themepark game.

 

I was responding to your post Owain. I understand that you want something, but I do not feel that you have a valid enough reason to change the current thinking to get it. Just my personal feelings concerning points that you are representing as fact.

Full loot is apparently not popular; industry-wide. I personally don't believe that this game will be successful if they travel down this sad, 17 year old road. I can't think of any other games that were. (Correction: Lineage 2 was pretty good and EVE, but that due to vast HiSec areas and cash for credit transactions)

The Dev team has done their homework and decided to go with ransom, res sickness, gear damage and experience debt; a combined solution.

A good role player could work with those rules and prosper.

 

Yet pointing out so called market reasons isn't acceptably valid enough, there is some need to insult anyone who would want full loot as somehow being pathetic and juvenile which actually makes your argument represent those who dislike that look so much better.

I don't need to try to justify it with pleas for realism or any of that. I want to opt into full loot and take everything off of a corpse or not because I choose to. I don't need to insult anyone who doesn't want to take the risk and I am going to ask for that to be a possibility no matter how far anyone else decides to go out of their way to make anyone who feels that way look bad. Ask for whatever you want but don't attack other people for doing the same.

 

It doesn't need to be universally popular, in the industry or otherwise, since I propose that it be entirely optional, so it will only affect those with whom Full Loot is already universally popular.

 

So this selection won't affect any other parts of the game at all?

 

I don't think so, but I'm open to counter arguments.

 

And here we get to which realistic aspects enhance or not that feeling. Do the characters needing potty breaks enhance the game (it's actually a feature in the Sims series)? Drinking water? Taking proper care of the mounts? Taking proper care of weapons and armor? Needing the proper amount of sleep, and becoming less effective if sleep deprived? Hunger? Realistic damage, including crippling and the possibility of sudden death, and realistic recovery times? Realistic travel times? Having the character draw his own map, and needing to actually hold it in his hands to look at it, instead of having a minimap? Currency that has weight? Local banking?

Each of the above is something that I've seen in a computer game, BTW, in some cases reasonably successful games, though some of those (like sudden death through lucky shots) are often restricted to NPCs because players really hate when it happens to them.

The effect of each of those in how fun the player perceives the game to be is, of course, different for each player. For example, apart from The Sims players, I have yet to see a player that defends the characters needing potty breaks.

Again, this works differently for each player, mainly because each has different skill sets, knowledge of different areas, even personalities. The very set of character interactions that the player wants to explore might be different.

In my case, for example, I don't really care about my character being shoehorned into a goody two shoes role because I always end returning to that role. In fact, I often can't play an evil character, or even a merely indifferent one, without intentionally breaking my immersion, because otherwise I return to my usual roleplaying of lawful good characters. I'm just never interested in exploring my character's evil side, so I don't actually mind if the game does not even include it.

Uncanny valley can act here. Besides, with adult players, it's not uncommon to find players that know more than the devs about some subject that is relevant to the game. It's more or less impossible to make something that will sound realistic, and not like just a shallow imitation, for all players.

My reference is pen and paper RPGs, where typically any uneventful part of the game was mercilessly skipped. Play time when we can get the whole group together is rare and valuable, and thus we avoid wasting it.

Actually, I'm usually an explorer to such a degree that, the first time I pass through a road, I will have not only stopped to smell the roses, but also mapped and cataloged them, perhaps even with a description of the aroma. The second time onwards I'm way less thrilled about the prospect of smelling the virtual roses.

Like I said earlier, I can't engage in them without breaking my immersion first anyway. And having evil acts practiced on my character by another player has only negatives for me. Thus, it's a bit hard for me to even see which value can be had by allowing evil deeds.

As long as they do so without forcing me to be a part of it in any shape or way, I'm fine with that.

 

And that is where the tunnel vision comes in.

The human condition is always ignored. But this debate was completely and utterly debated over and over again with the perma death crowd.

Perma death has one major impact that can never be forgotten. When you build a wealth and lose it all the question comes in "should I start over here or move on" This "wealth" factor varies greatly per person.

The devs have stated they wish gear to be personal and the players will want to use the best gear available. Full loot pushes the human condition to mitigate loot loss.

So now you have 2 worlds. All the content and substance the devs build will have to be gated to two extremely different mind sets. Look at the zone build thread. The topic discusses spawn camping and how to avoid this. It's a different challenge when you have full loot. Look at the story. Do the devs design the content for the players that wear the best gear available or the gear the mitigates loss, or 2 different modes of gear requirements.

Do the devs now work several design philosophies or stick with one plan that they want to show case. Test the one, if it doesn't work, so be it, they have time and skill to readdress. Or spread themselves thin and put dev time into several plans.

That doesn't mean shut up and get in line. Far from it. But I will always point out the balance points of all the other mechanics, not from the coder's mind and from the human reaction mind.

Full loot does impact more than just those that choose it.

 

How?

 

I just listed some right there.

Zone design.
Content.
Item loss mitigation.
Crafters. (due to loss mitigation)

I am sure there are plenty more.

 

Zone design and content applies equally to PvP, so that has to be addressed regardless. Gear used for PvP will be the lesser quality, widely available player crafted gear rather than the top of the line stuff, so neither item loss nor crafters should be seriously affected.

What else do you have.

 

Dismiss them all you want, the rabbit hole goes deeper than that.

The PvP they have planned is not going to have the same mind set as the PvP you are asking for. The purpose of PvP is very relevant. The purpose of full loot PvP quickly turns to be more about the loot and not about the purpose.

Look at a simple example of the human condition in the WoW battle ground Warsong Guilch. The purpose is capture the flag. When a team is dominating the field do they capture flags? No, they will run out the full duration and graveyard game the other team.

Do you honestly think that PvE has the same interests in zone design as PvP, now add in PvP full loot. The purpose changes. Maybe you don't shift to be loot oriented but others will.

 

Is it really about the player, or about the game? I appreciate that detail of The Sims, and would defend the potty breaks in being in the game, but I don't think it would be a necessary or meaningful element in SoTA. SoTA will have a broader focus. The Sims has a more narrow focus, but its fun, too. Games with different focuses can be equally fun.

I don't think leaving out elements of gameplay necessarily destroys realism. That's what I'm considering abstraction on the part of the game designers. I'm okay with a game having no PvP at all, or no travel at all, or no crafting at all, simply because the developers simply didn't think it was a choice they wanted to give players. Single player games obviously have no PvP, and usually no player housing, so its safe to assume you can remove this element from RPGs. But if you're building a serious RPG and put something in the game, my feeling is you treat it with the depth it warrants... otherwise it may not be worth putting in at all.

Crafting definitely needs to be about more than earning gold, otherwise I really don't see why it needs to be there in the first place.

And more thrilled at the prospect of talking to the next NPC on your quest list, then getting back to the first NPC, and so on and so on?

Do the games you're talking about give you much you need to do while travelling besides smelling roses? Do they require you to camp? Do they have interesting encounters? Do they structure the game in a way where you're basically not just an errand boy going from one NPC to the next? In the early Ultima games, and in fact many old DOS games, most of the games were just travelling around. Fast travel -- aside from things like moongates -- would have been seen as silly, because travel was the game-play, and if you removed the travel you would have removed the game. Imagine a U5 where you could arbitrarily travel wherever you wanted. Plus, when I did pen-and-paper games, there were also wilderness encounters; all of the adventures weren't just in dungeons.

That's more what I'm getting at. Making travel more than a meaningless accessory to the plot.. and returning it to the center of gameplay.

 

Full Loot is not the end objective, but merely a means to reach the objective. I don't take gear because I want someone's pants. I take their gear because I want to remove them from the battlefield so I don't have to kill the same guy every five minutes. In a guild war setting, if you take the gear from members of an opposing guild often enough they lose the capacity to fight. Without full loot, the only way to win is to wait until the other team gets too bored to want to continue. Why else would they surrender?

But if you think I dismissed your previous objections too lightly, how serious a problem do you think item loss will be, and how will that affect crafters? Won't crafters enjoy increased sales?

 

I couldn't agree 100% more. Open PvP and full loot should be a way of life (as sad as that sounds). But the realty boils down to a business making money (again... as sad as that sounds). A lot of people just want to play and enjoy a great game in peace and harmony without having their feelings hurt by getting their asses slain every time they go out hunting or flower picking in the wilderness. The more people that play a game, the more money a gaming company makes. The more money a gaming company makes, the longer the game stays online. I'm pretty sure the Dev's know what they are doing to incorporate a pleasurable gaming experience for both sides of the wall. It's like going to a crazy death metal concert with only guys there!

 

If full loot is offered as an option and attracts more players than it would have attracted otherwise, Portalarium will make more money, right?

For my part, I know that without full loot, some members of the KGB will still play SotA. With full loot, far more members will play.