Hangout of the Avatar - Economy and Chat systems

Cool thanks for noticing

 

Guys and ladies, so sorry - going to have to give up my slot for someone else. Have a family-related thing that popped up and I won't be able to make it back in time. Sorry for the short notice and I'll watch the hangout later for suggestions on how to make NPC chat better.

 

SmackTalk: social and knowledge graph based conversations. It's not just for leaving messages with barkeeps, you know.

 

No worries! Thanks so much for letting us know and enjoy your family event

 

I hope to make it back in time for the event... will be doing some work stuff in the early afternoon out of town... hopefully it goes quickly so i can be back in time, or only be a lil late...

 

I hope so too! I might need your devil's advocate side depending on what everyone else thinks on a few topics

 

Violation, I too will not be able to make it to the Community Hangout event today. To be honest, I seem to have over-extended myself with too many back-to-back events on this day (8 hours straight). I hope you and the audience can understand. I am not critical to the topics at hand and look forward to listening to the stream.

Dragonspeed with your event!

 

Okay so we have two seats open now... Lum and Winfield have both had to step out. If anyone wants to RSVP you can but you only have a couple hours left to do so!!!

 

View link:

 

We're closed to new people attending... those who stepped out are welcome back if situations change(d). I'll PM you the join links now.

 

• Global chat system(s)
  • Guild
  • Party
  • Do we want/need more? You decide! YESS.... Right now this game makes me feel anti-social with the lack of general chat.. I would ideally like to see the Website chat combined with ingame general chat. Also, I would like to see a dev+ chat implemented with a similar design.. I whole-heartedly hate the current chat as it is currently.. Please redesign it completely. Allow things like the ability to auto un-hide the chat when the chat is updated. More control and for chat to not be layed out like a database!!
• NPC chat systems(s)
  • What do they do now? good
  • How can they be optimized? this more related to quests themselves and how quest nodes are controlled and/or quests with multiple arcs.
  • What do we want to see? You decide! keep on rocking the text quests and hopefully add in mulitple nodes for quest completions
• Vendors
  • NPC Vendor likes/dislikes good
  • Player Vendor wish list! You decide! Some vendors only accessible via conditional circumstances - ie you must do *something* to get the vendor to sell to you. Also in some cases a vendor might require you to sell him something in order to relate to a quest.
  • Reveal: What does portalarium have planned right now for Episode 1
• Banking
  • How will it work?
  • Where will it work?
  • What can you do with it?
  • What do we need and what we don't want. You decide!
• Trade
  • Player to Player avatar trades
  • Player to Player vendor trades (partially covered prior so possibly will be skipped)
• Adverts
  • Wish list: how can we show what we want sold... signs/barks? You decide!

I don't have too much too add to this subject but I have highlighted my main thoughts... cheers

edit: oops already over, fantastic job Duke and everyone else. I will try to watch and get up to date.

 

First i want to say i really enjoyed watching the vid of the chat. i truly wish i could have made it when it was live. An aspect that was touched and i think could have been expanded that could help both player vendors and keep the encumbrance system is what uo had with bank deeds. you would physically have to take lets say 5k iron ingots to the bank. probably take you several trips to the bank. but once it was all in your bank box you could turn it over to the bank and get a deed for that 5k. iron ingots. this deed would be stamped with which bank you turned the items in to. for example owls head bank 5k iron ingots. you then could put deed on vendor or trade directly to player. that player that got the deed then would have to go to owls head bank to cash that deed and no where else. this would keep all encumbrance laws in place and allow for greater transactions on the map. same with gold you can get a bank deed for gold so you could buy such an item from a vendor but the player would still have to go to the bank that issued the deed. (note might want to make deeds only useable in the area that they were created)

Another topic that was touched was risk vs reward. with overland travel and etc, my problem that i will use uo as example here was if you belonged to the big red guild their was no risk in pvp areas and if you were not then u had all the risk. currently the community is small enough here that a player pretty much can join one of several major guilds in place or create their own small guild. so i agree with the points stated that its an option to play with a large guild or small and each truly has advantages and disadvantages. with that being said add 1 year into the game probably less all the current major guilds will become not to be mean but elitist, their not going to accept every noob in the game to their alliance/guild. therefore making it a choice to be large or small guild member not so much a choice but their only option.

When it comes to being allowed in to multiple guilds etc i think the ability to abuse this far out ways the benefits from being able to be in multiple guilds. granted i don't really care either way as i played a spy on several different servers in up however i think that allowing it here though might open up another aspect of the game especially in guild wars do we really want that. for an example being dual guild in privileged chat being able to copy and paste secret information into the opposing guilds chat. yes team speak will allow that as well but hey at least in single guild its a true commitment to your art of deception. i do like being able to have association tags that would allow us to promote activities such as amber was talking about with the radio station or even one of my own projects with new player/ welcoming committee project i was working on before not having to drop my tag in order to be recognized for something.

the only thing i really don't like with npc chat system now is that i can be talking to someone in game all of something i cant talk to them cause the npc keeps jacking my conversation and that person cant see what i have typed. i really am horrible at getting the secret words to get the quest. yes i can click all the words in the chat but many quests arnt started with the words in the chat. being able to bribe the person to get u passed a stuck point would be nice.

 

A couple notes that I remember from the chat worth mentioning.

gold weighs and encumbers (i'm fairly certain this is already slated)
keep chats in IRC.... dunno really.. this works but I'd favor something that is more automated such as a Steam auto-login style IRC.
unanimously voted to have alliances of guilds
a switch setting to disable NPC chat altogether for high player density situations -duke
Innovate the chat and redesign -unanimous

Anyways I think I missed a bunch of stuff, but again my reasoning for dislike of the current chat is that it makes me feel alone. lol

I see a bunch of PvE crap that is meaningless just about all the time in that interface.. Somebody emotes or sits down nearby and that shows up, as well as damaging attacks.. That's about all I have seen in the chat so far. There is a serious need to give this a make-over with more 'desirable' features and display designs.

I don't want to have each conversation separated into different tabs but I do want to have control of what text is displayed where - and not limited to just the chat menu either. For example if I want NPC chat to appear above NPC heads and in the chat then that should be possible.

If I want to have player XX's text appear in gold and orange letters on the right side of the screen then that should be able.

I already mention a auto-unhide feature which I think would be a easy feature to implement, but I am hoping for more than just a few simple tweaks here and there.

cheers

 

You nailed it on the head for issues with risk vs reward...a big enough guild can negate that risk. This is a flaw I have been talking about for awhile in regards to giving a higher percentage of rare things to PVP zones etc, it will unnaturally unbalance the game. If people can do something, they will.

 

There is supposed to be a solo game, therefore there must be a single player way through a control point.
Log in to Single Player, armor up, run like hell through control point.

Or, switch to PvE and Friend mode, guild of 4 goes through control point vs monsters.

Or, if control points are forced PvP and Open Player, then there must be another way.
Figure out the schedule for lunar rifts and use them.

 

Control Points don't make sense in a single player (online or offline) game, unless you can have NPC AI team members or hirelings or just NPC AI that can fend off the enemy. So I believe they are designing each control point with potentially a backdoor that needs to be discovered to walk around them. That makes sense for Single Player Online since it's a persistent world but in the offline game, do we really need control points at all? Unless we get all that NPC AI assistance?

 

Good Hangout, for me i just want to watch well listen whilst I play...

 

Just to play devils advocate, I can see having control points in single player online... you can \Summon any number of friends to play with/against with out any out side interference...

 

Actually /summon and /zone and whatever were being exploited/abused to create FPO mode which is why they disabled that to anyone in SPO. We know those commands are going away and the scenario you describe will be allowed in FPO mode. SPO will be purely that at launch: only you online, nobody else.

 

To make that clear, he would just have to switch over to FPO.