Windemere wrote:Cherek wrote:Windemere wrote:
Brute is a way of forcing people to quest. Why do we want to force them to do anything. Lets reward them for exploring, questing, roleplaying, rather than forcing them to do it and making it a "chore."
We are also "forcing" people to randomly slaughter hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent NPCs to grow in size, which, depending who you ask is a serious "chore" too. Much more so than questing if you ask me.
It's fun to take one sentence out of an entire post and comment on it specifically. I think I had much more to say in my posts as you did as well.
We differ in play styles. This only enforces the need to not "force" anyone to do anything. In what I had posted I was suggesting finding a way to reward people for questing if they choose to do it but not penalize them for not. I think this allows for those who want to quest rather than kill to do so while also allowing people to kill if they choose to do that.
Windemere
Well that was the part I mainly disagreed with so I figured it was that part in your note I thought was extra interesting to discuss further, and it would be more clear what I was replying to specifically. Sorry if it felt like I ignored the rest, that was not the intention, and I definitely did not ignore the rest. I'll elaborate on your whole note below.
Windemere wrote:I think you make a good point Cherek,
While I think Cotillion was likely making his comment tongue in cheek (hard to tell on an online forum) I think there is merit to it.
We want to attract all kinds of players to the realms and this means being accommodating. You talk about wanting people to be able to discover Genesis the way we all did, which is valuable and important, but at present questing is a necessity in order to grow in the realms. You cannot just hunt and explore and kill, you MUST quest for your character to be viable.
That's challenging to do for some people and thus, we lose them when they find out they cannot enjoy the game the way they would like to. Hence my suggestion. Rather than having questing be a necessity, have it be rewarded separately. It could be through imbuements, quest only weapons that are accessed, a smithy that can be unlocked through questing, access to something else or simply experience for rapid growth over killing a bunch of stuff. Numerous ways for it to be viewed.
Brute is a way of forcing people to quest. Why do we want to force them to do anything. Lets reward them for exploring, questing, roleplaying, rather than forcing them to do it and making it a "chore."
I think you just you cant really do a game _without_ "forcing" people to play in a certain way, if you do it too general and let people do whatever they wish and be too accommodating to what you think "everyone wants", you'll lose players because of your game being to general. At some point you'll need to make a decision and go with what you feel yourself. In our case, what the wizards in charge feel like.
Also right now quests are partly optional. If you want to grow really big you probably need to finish perhaps half of then or so? Or maybe even less if you only do the big ones. Draugor is pretty big but since he's a quest-hater he's missing quite a few quests I think? Or so he told me once, correct me if I am wrong Draugor.
And you could of course still play without questing, you'll simply have to accept being smaller. And on the other hand if you don't like grinding for XP you'll have to accept being smaller too. Which is something many non-grinders do accept. With your suggestion questing becomes optional if you can live without all the "perks" from questing, but if those rewards are good enough people will feel "forced" to quest anyway since otherwise they wont have access to the super-smith, or the super cool weapon etc. If you feel you "have to" be a myth today, you'll probably "have to" have all those perks too. And if those perks are too insignificant, questing becomes meaningless instead. Also, either way you'll still need to fight. What good are all those perks if you're still got wanderer stats. So tons of combat remains non-optional. So after all the work of redoing it all we'll still end up with a similar situation as now I think?
Thats why I think only having "XP" is the best solution. And that of course means boosting the XP you get from quests. Or reducing the Xp you get from combat. So it a reasonable balance between them. Lets imagine you'd be a champion if you solved all quests in the game, and did not fight at all. (except the fighting involved in the quests). Then a player could actually decide to not grind and only quest and still have a decent mortal level. But you could also not make a single quest and just fight your way there instead.
I also think that it should be theoretically possible to recalculate the XP on our existing player base as well. Cotillion can probably answer that question better though. I am not really sure how a system with individual "perk" rewards would work on existing players? Maybe you can claim all your rewards somewhere? It sounds like it could become messy though? And we have what, 300+ quests? That's a lot of perks, quest items and other rewards to come up with, create, and perhaps in some cases items, to carry around.
There, hope you feel I answered your whole note. Now I disagree with all of it, not only a part of it.
Nah, I don't think we really disagree that much though, we basically agree on the problem, just not the solution.