Posts made by Roccandil

Good thread! Snowballing in PvP almost seems like monopolies eliminating competition: you need a trustbuster.

One theory I have is that it's too easy to project power in MMOs; logistics aren't nearly as important as they should be. Defending should be easy; projecting power should be hard.

I think that's partly because in MMOs, no one can be online all the time, and so an organized attack squad is much likelier to have a local advantage, wherever they decide to travel.

A couple possibilities to make projecting power harder:

• Realistic food requirements. The farther away from home you travel, the more food you've got to carry or scrounge. Make this hard enough, and big armies will need to slow down to bring carts of supplies with them, reducing the likelihood of "stacks of doom" blasting remote, weaker cities.
• Always online defenders. Allow "ghost" versions of citizens to always be defending the city, regardless of whether or not the players are online.

Since Fractured has horizontal progression instead of traditional leveling, however, I suspect that snowballing may not be such an issue. We'll see.

If I ever design a game, I've decided I'll do everything I can to balance it around the mechanic that player's toons are -always- skilling up, regardless of whether or not the players are actually on, and thus organically bypass the bot issue.

Sounds cool! I'm already in a guild, but I wish you the best.

@jetah

Ya, bootstrapping can be fun.

Been wondering about that myself. Kinda figured it wasn't implemented yet.

I'm very curious to see how their anti-grinding philosophy works out in practice. Will linear progression have that "just-one-more-turn" feel, or will it be its own kind of drag?

I don't like seeing legitimate players punished by systems designed to prevent abuse: that swings the abuse from players against the game to the game against the players.

Hopefully bots won't be as much of an issue in this game.

@gofrit

Ya, I'd like to see that.

@dragomok

If you can spec a decent toon from the start with a specific skillset, theoretically I could just build a bunch of toons, each for a unique role, and thus minimize the need for any of them to do much exploring/progressing.

Still waiting to see how this will be balanced.

Cool.

@lightspoon

Very curious to see what those quests are like.

@jairone said in Friendly Fire:

...all of which means a random person can maliciously force themselves into distanced attacks that have AOE to harm people in a way that is completely against the intended game mechanics...

Good point! And lag being lag, I could see issues there as well, even if nothing malicious is happening.

I do feel like FF should be off for guildmates or alliances, even on Tartaros.

Very cool.

@lightspoon said in Intemization system:

The "skilled newb" that win against a "incompetent veteran" is a claim many games had already made in the past and have almost never be true: unless we're speaking of extreme difference in skill, a veteran should at last know the basic of the game and have a decent advantage thanks to all the time and the gear he farmed with time, while the newb has none of this.
If the difference given by the gear is at max a 5% (just to say a number) it may be true that the newb will win, but otherwise it seems unrealistic because the gap in health, mana, regen and everything else will simply be too much to overcome by someone who have little to none knowledge of the game itself.

That depends on if the newb is in a team with decent leadership. In World of Tanks, I saw a top-of-the-line player and excellent caller take a team of effective newbs to crush much better opponents with roughly equivalent (if not better) gear.

So, if a newb player is nearly there on gear, being in a guild with a good raid leader/caller may make all the difference.

Still not sure how I feel about everything being linear; we'll see.

Ya, the option would be nice; point-n-click to move tends to make my hand hurt.

Very cool.

@kniknack

Your own toons might be enough to keep that from happening (we'll see).

Oh, and nice work on setting everything up here!

@daz

Ya, would be a nice feature.

@dragomok said in PvP loot, an yet unasked question and diferent POV:

Honest-to-goodness, low-power-curve, horizontal progression is not something that was ever featured in a succesful MMO, as far as I can tell.

Ya, curious to see how it works here. One possible consequence is that it will be relatively straightforward to build a bunch of toons, all specced out for different purposes, and then you can just log with the one you need.

@thegreatelleon

Wurm Online has dyeing armor: you have to gather the ingredients to make the dye, and your skill determines how good the dye is.

It's a cool feature.