Alignment

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Cherek
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Re: Alignment

Post by Cherek » 01 Jan 2021 18:50

Drazson wrote:
01 Jan 2021 16:38
Cherek wrote:
01 Jan 2021 12:19
Huh? If i understand you correctly, you think we should just give it a go and see what happens, instead of trying to anticipate any negative effects beforehand?
In essence, "Yes for the love of god yes!".

You can consider what could happen depending on the change, of course, but nothing should be able to disable you from doing small balance changes. In the same vein that changing the colour of the button in these forums shouldn't be able to create a totally irrelevant bug like being unable to quote people in your posts or something rediculous, changing the mob's align should not be able to be game breaking in any way. If it is, there are bigger issues to look at or the code holds you hostage.

The same should be true for making some particular mob have more attack or less health. or (for example) realizing that glads lack a bit of damage and giving their special a 5% damage buff to make things better.

All such changes should be compartmentalized and easy to make, but they seem to be considered as life altering events to be treated with caution.


Happy new year everybody :)
Changing the core of how the alignment system has worked for 30 years isn't "a small balance change", and hardly comparable to changing the color of a button. It's a major change that will affect a lot of things.

I think you have misunderstood what Thalric's initial question was, or misunderstood my reply to it? I was replying to Thalric's question about the alignment system in Genesis, but it seems like you are talking about some minor change to a specific mob? That would be more comparable to changing the color of a button (depending on which mob it is :) )

Drazson
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Re: Alignment

Post by Drazson » 01 Jan 2021 19:29

Different mobs sway your alignment in a different pace, so one can only assume they are placed in the same spectrum of alignment as we are, for example an evil mob can be untrustworthy. Bump those untrustworthies to sinister is all I'm saying, which allows us to farm the alignment back up easier as Thalric posted initially giving the example of terel trolls. If that's not how it works and it's a number (-1.0 to 1.0 or somesuch), slide it from -0.2 to -0.4 for a couple of famous farming spots (we can give ideas).

I am not talking about an entire system changing.

sylphan
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Re: Alignment

Post by sylphan » 01 Jan 2021 19:49

Drazson wrote:
01 Jan 2021 19:29
Different mobs sway your alignment in a different pace, so one can only assume they are placed in the same spectrum of alignment as we are, for example an evil mob can be untrustworthy. Bump those untrustworthies to sinister is all I'm saying, which allows us to farm the alignment back up easier as Thalric posted initially giving the example of terel trolls. If that's not how it works and it's a number (-1.0 to 1.0 or somesuch), slide it from -0.2 to -0.4 for a couple of famous farming spots (we can give ideas).

I am not talking about an entire system changing.
If the whole system is geared to make it harder to become more good than to become more evil, messing with individual mobs, rather than addressing the systemic issue, seems sloppy and unwise.

Raelle
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Re: Alignment

Post by Raelle » 01 Jan 2021 22:04

sylphan wrote:
01 Jan 2021 19:49
Drazson wrote:
01 Jan 2021 19:29
Different mobs sway your alignment in a different pace, so one can only assume they are placed in the same spectrum of alignment as we are, for example an evil mob can be untrustworthy. Bump those untrustworthies to sinister is all I'm saying, which allows us to farm the alignment back up easier as Thalric posted initially giving the example of terel trolls. If that's not how it works and it's a number (-1.0 to 1.0 or somesuch), slide it from -0.2 to -0.4 for a couple of famous farming spots (we can give ideas).

I am not talking about an entire system changing.
If the whole system is geared to make it harder to become more good than to become more evil, messing with individual mobs, rather than addressing the systemic issue, seems sloppy and unwise.
indeed ... viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4300

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gold bezie
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Re: Alignment

Post by gold bezie » 02 Jan 2021 02:14

What Sylphan says is true. But there are more people around wo are good alignment. I think this will help somehow for starters to grow fast and have friends who will help them with that.

Personally the best way is to stay neutral when you are younger, finish all the quests and be able to team with whoever you want. But that is only if you want to grow large and powerful

If you want to build up a char that is more than large and powerful, think of who this char would be and go for it
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.

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Skythus
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Re: Alignment

Post by Skythus » 02 Jan 2021 05:33

If we think about it irl, you probably wouldn't trust your friend to be a Knight of Solamnia if they had spent years murdering civilians under the banner of Takhisis. In many cases killing people who are innocent, even if closer to neutral is frowned upon. I like Arman's idea of factions, but that would take forever to implement. It would be cool if EC and PoT leaders could "absolve" your past actions and convert your alignment to theirs, although that could get very broken very fast.

Thalric
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Re: Alignment

Post by Thalric » 02 Jan 2021 12:35

I had two ideas/solutions to the issue..

Either make everything a lot more neutral, as it seems that every evil npc is these days...
Or make evil npc's a lot more evil.

I don't care if you do it either way... just make it even on both sides!

Thalric
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Re: Alignment

Post by Thalric » 02 Jan 2021 13:56

Cherek wrote:
31 Dec 2020 17:18
It's been discussed many times. I think we were pretty close to making a change a while ago, but, for some reason this suggestion was iced for a while. I don't remember exactly why, but I guess something else got in the way.

In my opinion, it would be good for game balance if going from good to evil, and from evil to good, took the same amount of time and worked the same way. Thematically/logically, the current system makes sense of course. Once you start murdering innocent people you become evil quickly, while it takes much longer to redeem yourself and become good. But to better balance good/evil in Genesis, it would likely be better if it is the same both ways.

It's definitely still a possibility, question is, what kind of negative side-effects have we not thought about?
What kind of side-effects can there be about making alignment equally easy or hard to achieve for both good and evil???
Nothing!!

Evil players having to think about if they kill evil stuff for too long? Ohh the horror!
I am sure it will be really hard for them! Or imagine the hardship they will have when some goodies come and take some of their ents, kabal guards or centaurs from them!
I am sure they will all drop dead and die from lack of npc's to kill...

Or perhaps being evil while growing will just stop being such a huge added benefit.
Yes, huge side-effect that! We better not do it!

Drazson
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Re: Alignment

Post by Drazson » 02 Jan 2021 14:50

Skythus wrote:
02 Jan 2021 05:33
If we think about it irl [...]
If we think about it irl, evil people should not be allowed into most towns, onto boats, etc without a fight against the entire garrison/crew. That's why we dont think about this irl.

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Cherek
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Re: Alignment

Post by Cherek » 02 Jan 2021 19:27

Drazson: Right. So, I think we were somply discussing different things. I was replying to Thalric's question about what happened to the idea of changing the alignment system, so it's equally easy to change align both ways, while you were talking about a change to the alignment of some of our NPCs. A simple misunderstanding then.

I am sure you agree that changing the way the alignment system works requires a bit more effort and consideration? Simply changing the alignment of some NPCs is of course a much simpler thing to do, so there I agree with you. If we want to do that, that's obviously relatively easy, and would not have a big impact on the game as a whole, but changing the alignment system would.

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