Bonk deleted

[Dread]

Dread,

I agree with you that games where mystery is not lauded as important can be very fun indeed. Games definitely do not need mystery to be fun. I disagree very much, though, if you are stating that games where mystery is considered fun and important cannot be fun because of the mystery. I would use D&D as a prime example. The Dunegon Master doesn't sit you down and say, "Okay, here we have an enemy you're about to fight. Before we begin, I'll tell you: The enemy has three main attack types. They will include an ability to flank you, to freeze anyone in your team who is an elf, and the ability to teleport thirty paces away. What do you choose to do?" No, the DM would say, "You see a group of figures approaching through the mist. One of them points at you and the others grin. What do you choose to do?"

I feel like Genesis is more in the second mould, and I will always work to keep it there.

Maybe this will just feel like a philosophical answer, but philosophy is important to me.

G.

In my opinion though, this is a case of apples and oranges. In world exploration, questing, and other aspects of the game I would agree with you wholeheartedly. PVP? Not so much. I will use your example as well. If I were in a merry band of adventurers and came upon your group of figures approaching through the mist, and I had met them before, I surely wouldn't turn to my companions and say "Well, yea, I know who/what they are, but I am not going to tell you! That would ruin the mystery! Well of course you might die, but Mystery!"

Sharing information, formulating new tactics and methods for attack/defence to conquer one's foes is every bit as much a part of D&D as the other mysterious aspects of discovery and exploration. We are not allowed that. Mystery != enforced ignorance.

I don't have a problem with philosophy itself. I have a problem with philosophical answers to concrete issues. We seem to spend an awful lot of time off the trail as it were, smelling flowers. Discussions of issues that are not that complicated, span to years of conversation. That makes no sense to me. At the heart of our wonderful donut is a server, running software, performing math. Not a commune of hippies doing peyote and pondering the universe. For instance the Goblin race issue in another thread. Even if the answer is "No. Goblins are more powerful fighters because reasons. It is not changing." That would at least be an answer. That topic has come up multiple times in the last two decades, and will continue to do so because there is never a definitive answer, just philosophizing.

[Sykil]

At the heart of our wonderful donut is a...

a fun also crazy bunch of player who can no be quanticized, no a computer who is do math

why you are so angry? "oh no I am not, but i am so"
yes you very much so are

[Dread]

Dread: If you ask me, I think PVP was in many ways better 15 years ago. But it could also be you and me having fond memories of past days, when in fact I am sure we had problems back then too? But I remember it as fun, because it was a big part of the realms, and the feeling was that most people participating found it pretty fun, because they sometimes won, and sometimes lost. Today my feeling is that a very small portion of players win all the time, and the rest seem to lose all the time. Which is something I'd like to change. Nobody wants to go into a fight and feel it's lost before it starts. There is a reason most multiplayer games match you against someone near your level of skill, rank, size, or whatever it is. This is of course harder in a sandbox type of game compared to dedicated player vs player game.

I think a lot of things has improved in Genesis the last 15 years, and I think we'd be surprised how much if we were suddenly thrown into Genesis 2000. I think there are many things that has become better in PVP too. For example we have less "death trap" abilities / places / items, LAG isn't an issue, death is nicer, and I do think that the recoded guilds are better balanced vs each other today. Of course the fact that we still have guilds that are not recoded definitely causes a lot of balance problems between "old" and "new" guilds.

in my opinion the main problem is that any imbalance between guilds is made a lot worse when combined with other imbalances in races and especially size, but also player skill. Back in the days the size difference between most players were much smaller, and we did not have some players with 20+ years game experience vs players with 1 year experience. So if you're more equal to begin with, guild and race imbalances are less noticeable. It's when you add it all together it really becomes an issue, and that's where we are today. We have the biggest players, who are very skilled in PVP combat, using the best race, joining the best guild, and when they fight players who knows little about PVP, are considerably smaller, using an inferior race, in a less than optimal guild we end up with situations where players are killed from fvw in 5-10 seconds. This is not good. How to fix it? Well there are probably as many ideas as there are players in the game. What's your fix?

The mystery discussion is another discussion, and the level of mystery varies greatly depending on which wizard designed the particular area / guild etc. Yes, Genesis has is more mysterious than other games, and we will never use numbers for example, but we have also done a lot of things the last decade to decrease the mystery level, and make Genesis more user friendly. The tutorial teaches players about a lot of that now, stuff that before had to be found out by asking around, or testing. The quest orbs have helped questing a lot. Newer guilds usually give a lot more hints about which spell / ability is affected by what. The magic map shows big parts of the game, and the goal is for the entire game to be mapped. Before the magic map, exploring and making your own maps was the way to learn about the world.

Genesis is a lot more user-friendly and less mysterious now compared to 15 years ago I think, but the level of mystery also varies greatly between guilds and domains. What exactly is it you feel are the main things that are too mysterious, and should be more obvious in Genesis 2017?

First, I will not disagree to the "rose-colored glasses" hypothesis. I am sure there is some of that going on. I know for a fact that the coven I belonged to was OP as hell. I remember distinctly an emote we had that allowed us to gather up an awesome dagger without conflict. It was silly. So, sure, there were problems, but indeed, most people I knew of deemed PVP entertaining. I don't remember much grumbling about griefing and not nearly as much disparity in guild power. There were still issues of size even then. 3 of my friends found an old vamp friend of mine afk in some mountains, and proceeded to try and kill him, for what seemed like an hour. It took forever, and they were all largeish champs. I remember Puck killing all the dragons with some cheat, and getting so large it was unbelievable. Even with all that though, most guilds, and most players were a threat. That is not the case anymore. You did not need to be a myth to worry people. I had an alt back then that was pvping as a champ, usefully, with the largest people in the game at 8 hours old. Yes, there are quite a few games that match you with people of similar size. There are those, in my opinion, more interesting games where this is not necessary, because every character is given the ability to be useful in PVP in a few hours of play time.

I am not disputing the improvements of Genesis as a whole. I am strictly discussing PVP here. There are other issues of race difference and such that still need some work in my opinion, but on the whole yes, it has gotten better. Especially, as you say, in the user friendliness department. I don't much care for the nicer death thing, I think that is a salve on the wound that is HUGE characters that I don't much care for anyway. I wish there was something else to grind for or whatever instead of stat size, because that is definitely one thing contributing to the death of PVP.

I also agree that stat size is a force multiplier for guild imbalance. However, it is orders of magnitude worse now than it was when pvp was fun. No guild, none of them, could do to a player what can be done by the PVP powerhouses of today. It's not even close.

What's my fix? First and foremost is knowledge. You cannot continue to enforce our ignorance, not allow us an outlet for discussion on the matter and keep insisting that "it's balanced, we promise!" How could we possibly know? How could you possibly know? No discussion of guild abilities is allowed. For Chemosh's sake people even avoid talking about it in game for fear of retribution! Apparently extensive testing is done behind the scenes, but it must be one hell of a system to account for all the variables players can come up with. I am not indicting the wizard's abilities here. I am merely questioning if any small number of people working, as diligent and intelligent as they are, can account for what the 50, 60, or 70 of us is going to come up with. It is mentioned, by you as well, that there is a huge knowledge gap between those who are good at PVP and those who aren't... Please forgive the expression, but NO SHIT! How could there NOT be a knowledge gap? People rarely fight because -insert all the various reasons here- and when they do, there is absolutely no resource to get better! No one is going to just throw themselves at death over and over to learn what is necessary, especially when being big is the end all be all these days.

Second, I want to address a specific thing you said:

"using the best race, joining the best guild"

This is another thing that needs to be addressed. I will leave the "best race" part to another thread, but let's discuss "best guild". Why is there a best guild? I have no problems with roles. There are support guilds that will never be front line fighters, I get that. (Although, I will say once again that there exists the precendent for a guild that can do it all.) However, we have quite a few guilds that could be deemed front liners. Why does one have to be the best? As for the support guilds, give them tools to make them useful immediately. Heals, poison cures, buffs of stats, weapon enchantments, the list is extensive of small quality of life improvements that could be given to the guilds less fortunate on the PVP ladder.

Third... this post is going on long enough. There are lots of things that could contribute to better pvp, and everyone's ideas on what is most important on that list will be different. I will leave off here for the moment.

Lastly I have a question. With the amount of magic in the world becoming greater and greater, I am wondering what ever happened to the movement to add more and more things that add resistance in the game. It could be that it continued, and I just need to do an extensive amount of testing. The subject went quiet. Of course, I won't be able to talk about it... (poke!) I also wonder if imbuement resistances are used as a justification for power. It seems odd to me that I can pick up a piece of armour off of any corpse in the game and immediately mitigate melee damage, but farming enough imbuements to be useful could take weeks/months or more, and is quite likely impossible for most players. The new system to exchange types is probably going to help with that, and I salute those who thought it up and implemented it.

The really depressing thing, to me, is that the culture of silence and ignorance is so ingrained in Genesis at this point that even if we were allowed new freedom to discuss and compare notes, I doubt most would.

[Dread]

At the heart of our wonderful donut is a...

a fun also crazy bunch of player who can no be quanticized, no a computer who is do math

why you are so angry? "oh no I am not, but i am so"
yes you very much so are

I am going to take a swing here at what I think you are saying...

First, no I assure you I am not. I love arguing. I can provide plenty of references if you like. It doesn't make me angry at all.
Second, who are you to profess you know anything about me? If you attribute emotion to argument that is more a reflection of you, not me.
Third, I don't know how many bits comprise the definition of "You", but I guarantee it is quantifiable. Everything you do in the donut is governed by quantifiable rules. This isn't the matrix.

[Sykil]

Second, who are you to profess you know anything about me?

people who say like this to people are angry

[Dread]

Second, who are you to profess you know anything about me?

people who say like this to people are angry

Lol. So you are a troll, or just a horrible student of human nature. You truly believe that asking a valid question requires anger? We have never met, I know nothing about you, so if I started making assumptions about your character I would sound as silly as you do. Are you capable of stepping outside your own emotion and realizing you have no idea what you are talking about?

Either way, please address the points, or start a thread to disparage my character, this one has been hijacked to the topic of pvp.

[Cherek]

First, I will not disagree to the "rose-colored glasses" hypothesis. I am sure there is some of that going on. I know for a fact that the coven I belonged to was OP as hell. I remember distinctly an emote we had that allowed us to gather up an awesome dagger without conflict. It was silly. So, sure, there were problems, but indeed, most people I knew of deemed PVP entertaining. I don't remember much grumbling about griefing and not nearly as much disparity in guild power. There were still issues of size even then. 3 of my friends found an old vamp friend of mine afk in some mountains, and proceeded to try and kill him, for what seemed like an hour. It took forever, and they were all largeish champs. I remember Puck killing all the dragons with some cheat, and getting so large it was unbelievable. Even with all that though, most guilds, and most players were a threat. That is not the case anymore. You did not need to be a myth to worry people. I had an alt back then that was pvping as a champ, usefully, with the largest people in the game at 8 hours old. Yes, there are quite a few games that match you with people of similar size. There are those, in my opinion, more interesting games where this is not necessary, because every character is given the ability to be useful in PVP in a few hours of play time.

I completely agree with you that new players should be able to participate, and have a fighting chance, in PVP much quicker. I too think that is something we should try to accomplish.

I am not disputing the improvements of Genesis as a whole. I am strictly discussing PVP here. There are other issues of race difference and such that still need some work in my opinion, but on the whole yes, it has gotten better. Especially, as you say, in the user friendliness department. I don't much care for the nicer death thing, I think that is a salve on the wound that is HUGE characters that I don't much care for anyway. I wish there was something else to grind for or whatever instead of stat size, because that is definitely one thing contributing to the death of PVP.

I also agree that stat size is a force multiplier for guild imbalance. However, it is orders of magnitude worse now than it was when pvp was fun. No guild, none of them, could do to a player what can be done by the PVP powerhouses of today. It's not even close.

Again, I agree. This would be very controversial though as many of the big players probably would feel cheated if we somehow made their stats less useful, or even decreased them. I definitely think it would be interesting to explore other things people can do with the abundance of XP they gather, instead of pouring it all into stats, that you can't even see move as they're far beyond supreme anyway. I think we could accomplish both making grinding more fun, and player sizes more even, at the same time. But again it's controversial, and doing controversial things are never easy.

What's my fix? First and foremost is knowledge. You cannot continue to enforce our ignorance, not allow us an outlet for discussion on the matter and keep insisting that "it's balanced, we promise!" How could we possibly know? How could you possibly know? No discussion of guild abilities is allowed. For Chemosh's sake people even avoid talking about it in game for fear of retribution! Apparently extensive testing is done behind the scenes, but it must be one hell of a system to account for all the variables players can come up with. I am not indicting the wizard's abilities here. I am merely questioning if any small number of people working, as diligent and intelligent as they are, can account for what the 50, 60, or 70 of us is going to come up with. It is mentioned, by you as well, that there is a huge knowledge gap between those who are good at PVP and those who aren't... Please forgive the expression, but NO SHIT! How could there NOT be a knowledge gap? People rarely fight because -insert all the various reasons here- and when they do, there is absolutely no resource to get better! No one is going to just throw themselves at death over and over to learn what is necessary, especially when being big is the end all be all these days.

Like I said, the PVP testing arena Petros made gives us a rough idea on how guilds do against each other, but PVP is like you say much more complex than that in the real game. And the only way to know for sure is to monitor how it actually plays out in the world, I don't disagree about that at all. In a commercial game they would monitor everything that takes place in the game, make tweaks based on that data, constantly releasing updates, countering and balancing what players do. That sometimes happens here too, but we obviously have nowhere near the resources, or knowledge, as professional game developers in commercial studios have. It would of course be awesome if we had logs and advanced statistics on PVP encounters, but we don't. If anyone with the required skill surfaces and wants to code it, I am not going to stand in the way.

I know it's a boring answer, and it may sound as an excuse, but it is what it is too. There's tons of stuff we'd like to do, lots of ways we could improve the game, but we have limited time, and a very small numbers of wizards. We're getting more, but most are still in learning mode, trying to figure out how to do basic things. We're in a positive spiral though, more players, more wizards overall, and more wizards from the new player generation.

Second, I want to address a specific thing you said:

"using the best race, joining the best guild"

This is another thing that needs to be addressed. I will leave the "best race" part to another thread, but let's discuss "best guild". Why is there a best guild? I have no problems with roles. There are support guilds that will never be front line fighters, I get that. (Although, I will say once again that there exists the precendent for a guild that can do it all.) However, we have quite a few guilds that could be deemed front liners. Why does one have to be the best? As for the support guilds, give them tools to make them useful immediately. Heals, poison cures, buffs of stats, weapon enchantments, the list is extensive of small quality of life improvements that could be given to the guilds less fortunate on the PVP ladder.

Well, I should probably rephrase that. The best guildS and the best raceS. I don't think there is one guild or race you could consider _the_ best for PVP. But there's definitely some choices that are better than others. That's how it is right now. However I do not think there's one guild thats overall better than the others, it depends on the situation. Experienced players know both how to pick and combine guilds, and know how to use the strengths of the guilds in the right situations though, while, obviously, many of the new players don't. This is probably how it should be though, and always will be. But sure, things can always be tweaked in order to make more guilds better PVP choices, but I don't think _all_ guilds necessarily have to be suited for PVP either.

Another popular way to balance things instead of rock-paper-scissor is to simply make guilds more or less the same power wise, with similar skills, just cosmetically different. All guilds have skills in similar ranges, every special does about the same damage, etc. Each guild gets one "block" type ability, and one "move behind"-type of ability. That way would of course be easier to balance, but has anyone ever used "easy" and "Genesis" in the same sentence?:) I suppose our guilds reflects what entire Genesis is. A patchwork of different ideas, all somehow mixed together, with varying degrees of success. During these 27 years it's created some truly unique content, but also been the source of serious frustration. I do not think that will change. Genesis will always be a somewhat chaotic mix of everything. It's the charm, and curse, of running a very free sandbox type of game, where basically anyone can jump in and create game content.

Lastly I have a question. With the amount of magic in the world becoming greater and greater, I am wondering what ever happened to the movement to add more and more things that add resistance in the game. It could be that it continued, and I just need to do an extensive amount of testing. The subject went quiet. Of course, I won't be able to talk about it... (poke!) I also wonder if imbuement resistances are used as a justification for power. It seems odd to me that I can pick up a piece of armour off of any corpse in the game and immediately mitigate melee damage, but farming enough imbuements to be useful could take weeks/months or more, and is quite likely impossible for most players. The new system to exchange types is probably going to help with that, and I salute those who thought it up and implemented it.

I can't answer whether the existence of different types of resistances is used when balancing guilds. That's above my paygrade, and something someone with more knowledge in guild balancing would have to answer. The latest major resistance content added to the game was the potions shop in Emerald a few years ago, which created a very big shift in terms of resistance availability. Imbuements of course the other big change lately. Before those two additions, resistances were quite rare, now I'd say quite common? Or do players still struggle to find resistances even with those additions?

The really depressing thing, to me, is that the culture of silence and ignorance is so ingrained in Genesis at this point that even if we were allowed new freedom to discuss and compare notes, I doubt most would.

Is that really true? New players learn a lot about the game instantly from the newbie chatline. We have the FB page where a lot of things are discussed, quite openly. The forum is pretty open too I think, with a few exceptions, which I think is fine for an official forum. There are various Skype chats and small player-run "communities" where people discuss Genesis completely free. Also, a number of new websites have popped up lately where all sorts of information is being made freely available. So, no I gotta disagree with you there. People discuss and compare notes quite a lot, and we, the admin have absolutely no say what players talk about or share outside the game and it's official forums and FB group. On the contrary, we love the fact that people create chats and websites in order to discuss and share their information.

But sure, there are parts of the game that are shrouded in secrecy, but inside the game the only rules on secrecy are made up by guilds and the players themselves, and that's really up to you players to decide the level of secrecy you want in the game. Some guilds go to great lengths to ensure secrecy, and I think it's reasonable that the official forum and FB page honor the players in that matter, and don't spoil something that a lot of players take very seriously.

But I am not sure I am understand what it is exactly you feel is too secret?

[Dread]

First off, an aside. I appreciate you and Gorboth taking the time to have this discussion. We are never going to see eye to eye, but that's not what it's always about.

I completely agree with you that new players should be able to participate, and have a fighting chance, in PVP much quicker. I too think that is something we should try to accomplish.

I definitely think this would be a quick way to add improvement to PVP, except for one small flaw. In the games where this idea works, the older characters do not have the ability to mow through newbies like a farmer threshing wheat. That is very much the case here, and a solution would have to be found for that.

Again, I agree. This would be very controversial though as many of the big players probably would feel cheated if we somehow made their stats less useful, or even decreased them. I definitely think it would be interesting to explore other things people can do with the abundance of XP they gather, instead of pouring it all into stats, that you can't even see move as they're far beyond supreme anyway. I think we could accomplish both making grinding more fun, and player sizes more even, at the same time. But again it's controversial, and doing controversial things are never easy.

The problem here is, if the game is going to continue to cater to the extremely huge, than there is little chance PVP will be viable again, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe the majority here would enjoy a departure from PVP altogether. I don't in anyway pretend to be representing the majority, or even a minority. I just love PVP and would love to see it come back. Perhaps there is some answer like the bloodlust system I have seen before. I don't know.

Like I said, the PVP testing arena Petros made gives us a rough idea on how guilds do against each other, but PVP is like you say much more complex than that in the real game. And the only way to know for sure is to monitor how it actually plays out in the world, I don't disagree about that at all.

The problem I see here, and that I am trying to convey, is how can the wizards balance PVP by watching how it plays out in the world, when all that happens in the world is lightning strikes of overwhelming force and griefing? (I have no idea how much griefing actually happens, but it sure does get mentioned a lot.) What useful knowledge do you gain from a super myth Morgul disrespected, or whatever is grounds for death in their world, stomping a titan in 20 seconds? Or a team of huge Calians catching someone in a trap room or whatever and swarming someone to death in the same amount of time.(These are just examples people, not a history lesson.)

Experienced players know both how to pick and combine guilds, and know how to use the strengths of the guilds in the right situations though, while, obviously, many of the new players don't. This is probably how it should be though, and always will be. But sure, things can always be tweaked in order to make more guilds better PVP choices, but I don't think _all_ guilds necessarily have to be suited for PVP either.

What resource do you believe exists for non-experienced players to become experienced? Genesis players are notoriously closed-lipped about guild abilities, precisely because they are not allowed to be discussed. How do you learn to fight against another guild without knowing their abilities? Do you truly believe that the answer is to die over and over and over? Hopefully gathering 1 more smattering of knowledge? Do we want to have a PVP system that takes 27 years to learn? How is that going to foster more PVP?

...a very free sandbox type of game...

Someday if you are feeling masochistic we should have a discussion about this in another thread, or PMs. I don't agree that Genesis meets this definition at all.

I can't answer whether the existence of different types of resistances is used when balancing guilds. That's above my paygrade, and something someone with more knowledge in guild balancing would have to answer. The latest major resistance content added to the game was the potions shop in Emerald a few years ago, which created a very big shift in terms of resistance availability. Imbuements of course the other big change lately. Before those two additions, resistances were quite rare, now I'd say quite common? Or do players still struggle to find resistances even with those additions?

I guess I don't agree that 1 potion shop and rare imbuements meets the definition of quite common. Agree to disagree here.

But I am not sure I am understand what it is exactly you feel is too secret?

Now here I do feel that you are somewhat intentionally missing my point. I quite clearly said this is all about PVP. What do you need to know about your opponents to be able to fight them? Their abilities. I don't in any way expect my opponents to hand me their strengths and weaknesses on a silver platter. However, if I take the time to learn about something the hard way, I should damn well be able to discuss it. We are most definitively not allowed to do that. As I said before, enforced ignorance is not mystery.

[Dread]

Anyway, as I said before, I doubt I am representing anyone but myself here. I could go on debating and discussing this particular topic indefinitely. However, I doubt anyone but me much cares for my opinion on the matter. So I will stop writing walls of text.

I appreciate your time and the discussion.

[Arman]

I believe "Herding Cats" is the phrase I have heard used. I agree with you, but there is untapped potential there that I think is being ignored. Look at Eve, where a council is elected from the playerbase, and meets with the designers of the game in an effort to make sure that community concerns are looked at and rectified if possible. Why is this not possible here?

I am a big fan of Eve myself. Its a sandbox of player generated content. The pvp is fun and scales pretty well. New players can compete against 10 year vets, and player skill pays more dividend than game skills. Fights are rarely fair, and if they are you are doing it wrong . I sometimes wonder whether some of the principles could be applied to Genesis to make pvp more engaging... although they are two very different game styles and have evolved in two very different directions.

As for the community council, that became a bit of a farce. I think CCP regretted ever creating that.

Does Genesis need a community council? Our playerbase isn't big... and doesn't this forum serve the same purpose?