Death

[Irk]

And wasn't PvP a way to try to control players growth/size?

Interesting theory

Is time recovery harsh death penalty?

In most MMO there is no xp or size punishments and there is lots of PvP, whats more there are special servers without PvP for ppl who dont like it
So clearly harsh punishments are not good way to reactivate PvP in the game. It takes too long to recover and ppl lost mood for playing Gen (oh my God grind again, what a fascinating way to play, wheeee *sarcasm*)

[Rhaegar]

That's why I came up with the idea in the first place - to limit the penalty in a way. You'll know that no matter what happens you can't drop below certain point, which gives you some reassurance. Ideally of course, this would work with some form of hard cap which once reached wouldn't go down.

Anyway, the argument of controlling player size through PvP is pretty much moot in my opinion, seeing the frequency at which legends and myths die in PvP this days... It was possible before, when people were smaller and if you got ganked by a team of 4 Calians you'd drop really fast. We've all seen from the logs here how long it takes 5 myth/legend sized players with top notch gear to take down Irk to vbs, and then he just walks away...

Let's be honest with each other here. PvP is pretty much dead in Gen, with some few exception's like Beregond's Dagarim Aran, which provided some breath of fresh air for a brief moment before dying away.

[Creed]

I personally think that the recovery should end at myth.
So you always would stop recovering when you reached myth, and would go with very violent from there.
That would likely keep people from reaching these totally insane sizes.

If I should be a bit more radical, I basically think that the recovery should end at champion size, or be removed altogether, along with a lowering of the death penalty, depending on your size.
The bigger you are, the harder the penalty..

[Irk]

or maybe totaly radical and close the game? will be faster

[Rhaegar]

I guess to really see if people would be interested in PvP and how things are balanced towards it Genesis would have to borrow from Guild Wars a bit. Create a special event - "PvP weekend" - where people would be able to create new characters, all starting at myth size, which wouldn't be able to gain or lose xp. You would also start near a chest with all the uber eq to choose from, all the money you need and ability to join any guilds, all in the same small area (staging area you could call it). Then, every such character could step out into specially designated area, where they could PvP all they want

Or maybe introduce something similar to LotRO's Monster Play (which again, would require a special area), where normal characters would be able to enter after reaching champion size. People who would do a quest and would be at least expert in size would be able to go to the scrying pool, stare into it and log in as a monster character, which they would be able to make stronger, get better gear with etc. and ultimately fight against regular characters.

In either case, I don't really see anything like that happening within the next years, so we should opt for some other, more immediate changes. We all agree that the change is needed, we just can't agree as to what this change would encompass. Personally, I'm of the stance to hard cap mortal levels at hero/titan max (as I don't think that all the myths, who've been playing this game for better or worse for the past n-teen years would leave just because of such minor setback), but there are people opposed to such drastic measures.

[Cherek]

Well, I always liked PVP back in the days, but eventually the game outgrew me. I could not keep up in size, thus I could no longer participate. i simply did not have the time to grind as much as was needed, nor did I have the will to do it because I never enjoyed it, so that was the end of PVP for me.

Some time ago, before I wizzed again I considered starting a new mortal and attempt to kickstart PVP, similar to what Beregond attempted. But well... I realized there is just no way I could reach a size that would allow me to seriously participate in PVP. Most active people are legends or myths, and among the really big players, which now is a pretty big part of the population, even a new myth is considered to be fairly "small".

The step from newbie to myth even for and old player like me who can quickly do all the quests, is simply way too big. And if you dont use advanced grinding scripts, or spend many months, perhaps years of manually grinding daily, you'll never reach myth. If you can only spend time here an hour or two a day (at best) you simply have no chance of reaching any reasonable size at all within a reasonable time. And if you're completely new to the game, or even new to text games? Well, lets not even try to speculate in how much time that would take...

That's just a fact, or can anyone argue against it?

Good or bad? Well if you enjoy gaining new levels its great with no cap and a lots or mortal level and stats to reach.

If you want a game where you need to spend some time gaining levels and learning about the game, and then want to be able to participate in PVP, politics and RP interaction with and against others, Genesis once was a good game for you, but no longer is.

Genesis today is a game that imho is mainly about PVE, cooperation and reaching new levels, growing your character, earning new stats, skills and levels within your guild.

I personally would like it to be that other game again one day. For that to happen we would need some radical changes. I dont know if the game can survive radical changes though, and maybe we're better off with this "new" Genesis that is very little about PVP, RP and interaction and is more of a single player adventure/hack and slash text game, and maybe that is what it should be?

[Cherek]

About death penalty... well I think the problem with death penalty cannot really be answered without answering a much bigger question first. Death penalty is one of a bunch of popular topics we always discuss here, and each of these topics have hundreds of solutions that some like and some dont. However, the question I think needs to be answered first is:

What type of game should Genesis be?

Without knowing what type of game this is supposed to be, there's really no way of answering questions about death penalty, or stat caps, or quest XP or PVP systems, etc etc. What should Genesis be about? and who is our typical player? Thats two questions I would like to see answered. And posted everywhere for everyone to see. Always. Then we could start discussing the details. Without knowing what the game should be about, or what type of player that should enjoy playing it, we really cant say what type of death penalty we should have.

And who should answer that? Well... it really comes down to someone, or a group of people, stepping up and deciding what type of game they want Genesis to be, and then go all-in on that vision. Currently I think we are somewhere in between everything. Genesis is a patchwork of different areas, styles, ideas, and game structures and nobody really seems to have a clear idea on what type of game Genesis should be.

Hm, I think it's time for a ship metaphor! I think Genesis is a drifting ship without a captain and/or crew currently, and for it to start sailing again I think we would need a very strong and motivated captain who clearly knows in what direction to sail, and a crew who's completely in on it. I am not sure if we lack a captain or crew or a little of both, but it goes both ways, a captain can do nothing without a crew, and a crew without captain is pretty useless too. And by captain I dont mean it has to be one person in charge... a council would perhaps have been a better metaphor... but that didnt work with my ship theme. Anyway, you get what I mean, we need strong leaders with a clear idea about the game, and a bunch of coders who's interested and motivated to make these ideas happen.

And now dont get my wrong, I am not trying to complain on Gorboth, Petros, Cotillion, Mercade and the others in the crew who keeps this ship floating, (I just love ship metphors!) they all do what they can, and some even more than that, and without them we probably would not only be adrift, but rather on the bottom of the ocean. And Gorboth has been/is a good captain and there has been alot of good changes under his command, but the wizard community is tiny and needs new people. With fresh ideas and lots of energy. And not only regular wizards who wants to code, we need people who want to lead too. Maybe especially that. Gorboth cant do everything himself, and he really did try.

Without a bunch of strong motivated coders and leaders who all agree on a vision and a goal for Genesis, I think the game will continue to drift in different directions until it's eventually forgotten and only mentioned in sentences like "Do you remember that old text game we used to play?" And that would be too bad. Considering how old the game is, it has the chance of becoming the world's oldest still active multiplayer game. Maybe it already is? Genesis is almost, or is it over(?) 20 years old. Can any game beat that? I for one would love to see it hit 25, and beyond.

And dont say a text game could never be popular again. If crappy games like Farmville and the likes can get hundreds of millions of users, our game can get a few hundred. It's just a matter of making it happen. And thats the hard part, but it should probably be easier for us since we actually have something worth selling.

[Rhaegar]

I agree with you Cherek, but not on the Farmville comparison. Games like Farmville are easily accessible for anyone and don't require you to spend a lot of time on it (in a single sitting that is). You can just launch it during some slow moments at work, click a couple of things and be done with it for the next couple hours. Can't do that with Genesis, it requires you to stay active and focused (focused only if you're not using scripts or have only minimal automation) and you can't really achieve anything in it in one or two hours. Well, maybe when you're smaller you can do a quick quest or something but as you get bigger and bigger and you know you have JUST 1 or 2 hours to play, you'll usually just check your mail in gen and then proceed to play something else entirely.

It's one of the topics Laurel raised, that we're all getting older, get jobs, families and so on, have less and less time to play the game and it requires us to invest more and more of that time. This might be a reason for many people leaving.

But let me ask the big guys, how long does it take you to actually make any kind of reasonable progress in the game?

Another idea is to give smaller people something else to do. Make all the big grinders depend on the smaller population to be able to keep them going. Smiths should be able to craft some uber stuff, but gain guildstat not from regular experience but just from crafting, valar and other magic guilds should have their healing spells set to heal the % of target's hp instead of a fixed amount, making them a desirable addition in any sized team etc. This way smaller players would be able to contribute and wouldn't be considered a dead weight in some bigger teams for example.

[Cherek]

Rhaegar: Its obviously hard to compare Farmville and Genesis as games, they are completely different as you say. The point was rather that if there are hundreds of millions of people who want to play Farmville (which I personally think is a terrible game), then there has to be at least some people out there who would like our game too.

Or take Minecraft as example. Who would have thought a game with old 8 bit-style graphics would become so popular in our time with graphics heavy games?

All I am saying is that a text game could also be popular 2012, and some have already managed it. We could too.

[Kas]

How many (new) wizards actually do manage to add substantional new gamecontent to the game? New domains? Brand new grinders? Several worth-todo quests, or guilds? What about analyzing and in practice modernize/revitalize the current old and possibly critically flawed gamemechanics (death, charactergrowth) that for some, is long since is out of bonds?

What separated the old eager wizards vs the current that could with ease create substantial content in a short period of time?