Best posts made by FibS

Like I said in a previous poll topic, here's my refined version of @Flamerunner's race poll! It'll end Sunday July 15 at noon.

A few notes for your consideration:

• "Factions" are not strictly based on race or planet directly, but more on alignment. While each race begins with a certain alignment, it can be changed with some effort - both determining, and being determined by, the character's playstyle. Each of the three planets is particularly favorable to one alignment: Arboreus for Good, Syndesia for Neutral, Tartaros for Evil.
• While Beastmen are "born Good", a Beastman can become Evil and mutate into an Abomination. Like Demons, Abominations are largely confined to Tartaros with only limited time on Syndesia and near-complete exile from Arboreus.
• While Demons are "born Evil", a Demon can become Good and mutate into an Angel. Angels are presumably barred from Tartaros like Beastmen, but whether they are welcome on Arboreus like Beastmen are is uncertain. I expect it to be very, very difficult to become an Angel due to the limited good karma options available to Tartaros residents.
• So far as we know, Humans do not mutate in response to alignment and will always be tethered to Syndesia; e.g. good Humans are not identical to Beastmen and can't live on Arboreus, and evil Humans are not identical to Demons and can't live on Tartaros.
• I do not know if Abominations and Angels can re-mutate back into Beastmen and Demons respectively.

That's it I think! Have fun! ^v^

@Pluto said in Pledge Packs Are Going... With A Sale!:

[...] Star citizen has a wonky business model, but they never completely shaft their Kickstarter backers.

Oh my god nobody "shafted" the Kickstarter backers, stop making shit up

@jetah said in Gender of Heroes:

characters don't have "gender". they can't reproduce so it's irrelevant.

Gender is not a biological concept; it's an expression of presence or identity. For instance, in most languages, words have genders.

Where humans are concerned, gender is mostly a social role; it's whether a person is seen as a masculine or feminine presence (or neither) by their society. While the West mostly-consistently conflates physical sex with social gender, the Hindu culture has for a long time recognized a semi-religious third gender whose definition varies with the region and which has evolved alongside sexual identity culture.

The point is, a fictional character has a very real gender regardless of any sexual organs or reproductive capabilities either in fictional canon or in reality, because gender, while often influenced, is not dependent on such a thing.

And I will be a cute deer lady. (More preferably a bunny lady.)

@jozef said in Where is Fractured advertised?:

I don't want the devs to spend any money on advertisement. That's just a waste of money.

This thinking is a great way to kill a game

The problem is that people are coming in here expecting a typical RPG with a beginning and an end - defined by grinding - and they're not about to get it. They're getting a virtual world, almost like Second Life but more specialized and with actual gameplay elements.

It seems some players are literally unable to comprehend this and no matter how many times you tell them, it bounces off and they keep going like you said nothing, i.e. they are utterly delusional.

But eventually, they'll play the game and be stunned by the reality of it. And if that chases off the most toxic PKers, good, the game will be better without them. Only people who actually like PVP and/or are actually good at it will remain, rather than frail egotists who need a gear / headcount superiority to make up for skill.

To condense everyone else's information...

Towns do not require a guild to function, and indeed if you're not in a guild you will want to stop one from taking over your Town if at all possible as a Free Town can elect governors democratically whereas a Guild Town is oligarchical.

You can also claim a spot in a Free Zone and have a simple house there, though you won't have access to standard shop or guard NPCs.

You should have no trouble finding a casual guild that will let you in (and into their Town) with few to no requirements on group participation.

Imagine if the game required you to get back to your corpse after death or else your character was deleted, and then some jackass demon ate your corpse.

Ultima Online's "items drop to corpse" system might work for this style of game - at least, for PVP kills.

Note that in old Ultima, there was no insurance system. It was very rare to get a scroll to "bless" an item that would follow the player's spirit after death. Also, if the player was a paladin or mage, their spellbook was Blessed automatically.

@KairosVal Turning Demon -> Angel, last time I looked into it, was planned to be very difficult. You may want to start with human or beastman so you can hang out on Syndesia - griefers will want to avoid it because griefing has consequences.

@PeachMcD said in Your favorite Dailies, or what you would like to see them as.:

The rat-tail quest doesn't sound like a daily to me. It sounds like a Quest.

Yes, a daily quest. A daily quest is literally a quest, taken from an NPC or other trigger entity like any other quest, that you can do roughly once per 24h. All modern adventure-type MMOs do daily quests this way, following the trend of WoW. They are usually the gateway for otherwise unobtainable rewards - for instance, doing goblin-slaying dailies may unlock goblin-themed cosmetics.

Non-adventure games (e.g. mobile gacha games) have daily activities that are not quests in the traditional sense as you do not go get them from an NPC like you do with quests. These games tend to be considerably more streamlined, so they semi-intelligently pick and choose dailies that reflect what "progress" means in the game, such as "upgrade your weapons 3 times" or "do the daily dungeon".

As an open-world game, Fractured would likely lean more towards traditional daily quests and less towards gacha-style mini-achievements. The two examples you gave sound utterly bizarre and unintuitive to me as a player of non-mobile MMOs.

Left click is both move and interact, which is a problem when you're surrounded by interactables but want to move.

There is no reason to hold down left click for an interactable, but every reason to hold it down to move. Therefore, I suggest that if the player holds down left-click while mousing over an interactable, the interaction cancels or the context menu closes and the character moves accordingly.

@Fibulator The website links to the official wiki alongside the forums. https://fractured.gamepedia.com/Fractured_Wiki

The wendigo is a part of American aboriginal culture / religion dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. It is a malicious spirit and taboo whose mention draws it to possess people and turn them into cannibalistic zombies, as portrayed in Until Dawn. Many modern tribesmen resent its replacement in popular culture with that zombie-deer thing, which was conceived in the 1970s or so.

So I say: don't call it that. The deer people are called Erwydra or whatnot, so instead of Wendigo, make up more fantasy babble.

The human transformation into a Lich is more similar to a proper Wendigo than whatever the deerkin would turn into.

@d3Sync said in What to expect on an "alpha state" game?:

I think the phrasing alpha, beta, early access are essentially meaningless [...] Everyone has a different opinion of what each stage should mean.

That's because people don't look up what words mean. Here is what the terms actually objectively mean:

• alpha: Extremely early development. Testing to make sure technology and developer ability supports game vision. No guarantee game actually runs without crashing, losing data, or obviously horribly glitching.
• beta: Mid-to-late development. Game is stable and playable. Most or all major game mechanics are in, but not necessarily every minor feature. Game is not yet optimized.
• early access: 99% done, mostly optimized, and ready to ship. Some lucky few get to play it early. A few bugs or other issues may come up that may be patched before the official release date.

As long as developers are being honest and using these terms correctly (which they're admittedly often not), they're being as transparent as they should.

I would consider Fractured to remain in alpha until the following are all implemented and working on some basic level:

• All three planets
• Asteroids
• Alignment and Syndesia's justice system
• At least one Beastman+Abomination and one Demon+Angel (to test the Alignment system)
• Eclipses
• Towns

... and maybe a few other major mechanics I'm overlooking

I'm so tired of seeing heated arguments between hostile babies over trifles like who gets to make a game all about them.

"Playing solo" in an MMO is not the same thing as playing a single player game. It simply means that players are not obligated into contracts or duties to a party or guild. They absolutely retain the option of selectively trading with or otherwise engaging other players and this should always be encouraged (not enforced) or else it isn't an MMO.

There is not one single reason that any player should be forced to persistently play in a group in an MMO, especially one that limits its gameplay for the sake of lore or immersion like Fractured. It is unrealistic that every single person has to be in a group to accomplish the slightest thing and there should never be an invisible ghost barring you from doing basic things like "Sorry, you can't put this crafting station in your solo house, only in a city."

Solo players are already inherently punished by the nature of playing solo. Groups drastically cut the time taken for build projects or resource farming, and are able to specialize each member to produce a flawless team. They can also have someone on in a wide set of time zones. Solo players on the other hand require hours to build anything permanent, are only available in one time zone, and (unless the game is a scrub game) can only be good at one thing with glaring weaknesses. Of course, if a hostile group finds a solo player, they will easily floor them assuming all characters are roughly equal in strength, as Fractured fancies itself to promote.

That said, it is ridiculous to force all player cities to be usable by all players. That simply doesn't make any sense from either a gameplay or a logical standpoint. As brought up earlier in the thread, it lessens the reward from building or controlling a city (which is a large investment) and can even benefit enemies. Besides, if cities are meant to be guild-controlled city-states, why would they inherently be available to the general public? Would this apply to Tartaros as well, where there is no global society and everyone is everyone's enemy?

This problem could be rendered moot by simply allowing solo players to do full crafting in their own solo homes, rather than forcing them to do it in a city for no apparent reason. Otherwise, there is no point to solo homes, as they are objectively wastes of time and resources since you can't convert any of it to a city.

Fractured is too concerned with looking like it's different from other MMOs and not concerned enough with a solid design and good experience. If it works, do it. If it doesn't, don't.

EDIT: Apparently, solo players can build any crafting station in their homes that their closest city has researched. This makes no sense, but okay.

@evolgrinz said in Hyping this new MMO :

@fibs I will have to disagree.
Hype might get you a pile of players at launch, but if people are disappointed, it will lead to bad reviews --

I'm sorry, are you aware that this is 2018? Nobody cares about reviews in 2018. Everyone already knows IGN's 10/10s are paid for and that most amateur reviews are from legions of 12yo kids who rate the game what they want it to be and not what it is.

That's why all the Jeff the Killer shovelware has 5 stars on the app store.

-- and many people would see the bad reviews and will not try it out even long after the game launch. Just as an example, look at No Man's Sky and that whole fiasco at launch.

You must be joking.

Are you denying that No Man's Sky was absolutely terrible? Hype didn't kill that game; not delivering on a single promise made, and actually devolving from the first reveal trailer, killed that game. It would still have bad reviews and no players without the hype because it is an innately bad game that nobody wants to play.

Similarly, Mighty No. 9 wasn't a failure because it was hyped too much, it was a failure because it delivered absolutely nothing it factually promised and ate up a massive budget to put out a bargain bin shovelware.

Correlation ("these games were heavily hyped and also failed") does not equal causation ("these games failed because they were heavily hyped"). You just don't know about games that failed terribly if they weren't hyped enough for you to have heard about them.

So if there is no hype, then a bigger chance people will not get disappointed and people will leave good reviews, leading to more people wanting to play to see the praise of other players.

No, actually, that's simply not how it works, as every single last commercial game in history proves.

Most games that are extremely hyped and do not turn out to be scams like No Man's Sky and M#9 retain excellent reviews because kids with unrealistic expectations are only a minority of the player base, and because hype / fandom also causes a competent game to seem better than it really is thus improving its reviews. Good examples of this include Skyrim and Warframe.

A game that is not hyped has no player base to give reviews to begin with and is doomed to fail simply because it did not market itself. "Hype" is just a colloquial term for good marketing, from the perspective of the consumer.

@jackromano said in Win a Pre-Alpha Key with The Foundation:

Is It the only way to get the Key?

• Prealpha: Foundation only
• Alpha: Kickstarter only
• Beta: Kickstarter only

Keep in mind that the Kickstarter will also offer Foundation points as a backer reward, meaning it can hypothetically be used to enter prealpha.

@heeroneko Doh! I guess I should've been more active lol