Shattered Kingdoms

The warning is provided by the bounty NPCs. The problem there is that they don't spawn fast enough to stop a group going through just two rooms and sometimes they can't see invisible/hidden (but not always, that could be a bug). Obviously you are going to generate more kills that way but what's the point of that? More people will just avoid cities and any kind of conflict because they will simply not be bothered enough to reequip. It will not increase PvP, just the griefing that comes with it.



Being addressed? It's becoming harder for non-tanks, that's my whole point. If light armor moves away from easily accessible areas, then a light armor character does not only have to wait for a priest/sorceror to log in to enchant his gear, he needs to wait for an allied tank to get him more armor and weapons. That's a whole lot more hours wasted, not less.

Also, saying that getting good consumables just takes a trip with a group to your nearest enemy warparty is like saying that you can go to the moon just by taking a rocket ride. Just because you can put it in one sentence doesn't mean that it can be done with a snap of the fingers. Getting the right group together can take time, depending on alliances, RP, playing times. It's not simple.



No, this is a problem for many characters because not every faction has active tanks. In fact, many factions do not have any or the ones they do, do not play enough so even alliances won't help. Be a little realistic, classes are not equally distributed.



Bounty mods already give you early warning. So remove the early warning to replace it with an inferior early warning system? Do you want audible warning for citizens? The gate guards (sometimes, it's buggy) yell when they are attacked. Making the city ungateable is not a bad solution at all, have a spot outside the city walls for quick transportation near a city so everyone has to walk through designated entrances. I still don't see a point in removing the bounty NPCs to do that.



Then what's the point of being in a tribunal anyway? NPCs holding spells are going to be removed in a future update and they are already subpar (no GM NPCs holding shield or armor to make it as insanely useful as you think), you want to "CRS" them with the addition of irrecoverable crystals that turn cities into Swiss cheese and the NPCs would have to be buffed to GM to be something more than a speedbump to a group with healers. The point remains, without ooc coordination no one in their right minds will join a tribunal while playing bards, rogues, priests etc.



It's a fact you have to consider when you suggest changes, you can't shrug it off and it's not an accident that it's mostly tribunals that remain empty. They are underpowered and they suffer without the right classes in them. If you have to call it a recruiting problem, it's a problem of PCs not seeing any point in joining a tribunal, not a clash of personalities (usually).



For non-tanks without any of the usual benefits? Give me a reason why a bard would want to join the Guardians while they are empty. Not RP, I mean actual advantages that will allow him to fight without begging left and right for help.



And how is that a beneficial change to make? More deaths doesn't mean more PvP, more deaths will mean more people avoiding conflicts to avoid getting jlooted. Which will only result in no one joining tribunals or empty factions. Why become a target when you can't even get away reliably? It's very simple, if you want more deaths for some reason, the only way to incorporate that without destroying balance is by making it easier to reequip. As it is now, the time wasting process of enchanting and gathering gear is made up by the difficulty of dying if you have your wits about. Changing that is balance breaking.



I agree with that but that requires a different kind of fix. Make the cities into fortresses, buff up the bounty NPCs so that they are worth their cost. Besides the early warning they provide and the sometimes useful slowdown of enemy groups moving too quickly around the country side, they are not much of a threat.



That wasn't my point here, it was the disadvantage of being in a tribunal when you are not playing a class that can tank. If you do it's game over regardless of what actions you take and random citizens assisting doesn't quite cut it.



I'm not sure what exactly you are responding to here but it's definitely not what I wrote. It's about balance, what do repeated deaths and city demolition have to do with it? You can't argue in favor of RP solutions as a way out for a game that disadvantages particular classes by design (with the suggested changes, that is). That just reinforces my argument. If you play adventurers and clergy in empty factions, the only thing you can do is to avoid conflict/give up/surrender/bring out the lube. I doubt many people want to do that and it will just create a ton of tanks, bandwagoning in one or two factions and a ton of people either quitting the game or remaining neutral to the point of boredom.

I know what you were talking about, and I still disagree. When I was playing Huneria and got full jlooted by Zerel, I was back fully prepped, enchanted, and ready to continue kicking your teeth in in less than two days. In fact, the enchants I had the second time around were better than the first. Literally less than two days. The majority of the time I've been jlooted on Tari, I've been back, fully equiped and ready to go in less than one day, largely because I'm not as particular about the enchants I'm using. All it takes is one, sometimes two helpful PCs. It's not like brew/enchant capable characters are in short supply. With request, which your character has access to, it takes even less time.

You don't need a pain stick or a ritual spider dagger to be effective, they just help. Weapons are not hard to come by, and yes there is a difference between using one of the OMGSUPERSTRAWBERRYFLAVOREDAWESOME ones, but it's not critical to being a success. By far the biggest time sink after getting looted is the enchanting process, which can be handled by someone while someone else is handling the brewing process. Both can be accomplished to an effective (not superlative but effective) degree in a day or two. Room for improvement can come after that, but it's not like it takes you out of the game to any great degree for good for a month (which I noticed you shortened to a week in the above post, though that's still a gross overestimation).

Bounty NPCs don't need a buff. Stop depending on NPCs to do everything for you.

This is factually incorrect.



This, too, is factually incorrect. The only general truism is that making harder to get and rarer in general makes life more difficult on newbie players (doesn't change the game much for experienced players). And I'd argue that a newbie warrior in tanso steel is a hell of a lot worse than a newbie priest, rogue, warlock, or bard in brass.



Look, I could go on, but most of this goes down to a simple truth: You are a newbie. You're resilient in the face of getting stomped, about as stubborn as OA from what I've seen, and from everything I've heard have the capacity in you to roleplay very well. There's potential there, but potential doesn't make you good mechanically, and it is very difficult to build a faction without having someone good with mechanics to do it. Reinald, like Cendre, is not a "leader". He's in power, but he's not collaborative - he's more of your classic I do what I want and eff you noble. I played characters like that when I was a total newbie, so I sympathize with your plight! However, to extend that to asking for balance changes to consider the fact that you're struggling to recruit is silly.

For strict PK, tribunals are more powerful than cabals. They're not underpowered.

This was a good note. Not that I disagree with everything Sargas is saying here -- I can see implementing some of it. But I definitely disagree with other parts of it.

Y'know, I'm not entirely sold on this. I really don't think cities should be safe, whatsoever. The problem with focusing fighting at 'gates' is that you realistically have one-shot-kill skills, and a lot of gimpy cheese tactics (IE retreat/holy word, such narrow fighting fields would completely over power a certain dark cabal spell, the dawn of warlocks and AOE, etc) that makes it an absolutely tragically bad idea. There's not enough balance in drawing out PK and adding tactics to it yet to make gate fights/large fights compelling. It's basically attack when no one else is on, or get cheesed by defenders. That's not just tribunals, or anything. That is the entire game in general. That's why combat ratios are almost always completely skewed.

Aside from all the PK balance issues that are innumerable, making cities too safe effectively squashes PK in a big way, except for portal stone fights. The problem you have now is people already use obscure places to socialize. They're busy leveling or doing something. If it's too hard to scout a city, start something, et cetera, you're going to leave people sitting around locating corpses/limbs trying to find places to go to kill people. And another wave of Dark-Avenger-esque people who think holing up in a city being unkillable is winning PK.

We need to focus on making cities the battlegrounds, but not in a way that completely overwhelms the balance in the sake of even mediocre/outnumbered defenders. I think the focus of conversation needs to shift toward making it easier to attack cities, but more compelling to make even odds.

How that comes to be is up to debate, but the issue right now is that a fair fight is hardly a fair fight. A 'fair fight' always, always, always skews towards defenders.

An outlandish opinion from me: have each vendor in a city have a 3 tiers for their items: trashy, mediocre, amazing. Maybe have armor go from iron, tanso steel, adamantite. Or leather, dragonscale, mithril. Cloth, flame, energy. Have consumables go from weak, strong, powerful. Something like that. Have any PK that goes on in cities get tracked like the cabal PK does, and based on victories/defeats, strength ratio vs defenders (a "valor"-like system), the vendors in your city get progressively worse/better. Maybe between tribunals, at least. Is that a good idea? Eh, probably not, but it's an idea.

Another debate that could be made, that also seems interesting to me: completely fortify cities as NXS talked about, but make Teron an infinitely more compelling place to PK in. Make all guards able to walk it, increase the amount of no-magic rooms, create new potential traps to lure people into, et cetera. Maybe something that makes you walk away with some buffs for even fights that'd skew CRS in your favor.

There's seriously a lot of the things we could talk about depend on the focus people want SK to take. But, in my opinion: if you are serious about making group-on-group PK more enticing, I really think this conversation needs to turn towards one of two avenues:

1) Getting more tactics and removing more cheese from PK (a humongous undertaking)
2) Creating a very compelling reward system for even, large-scale fights.

And, of course, the ever-present #3 that doesn't need saying:
3) Enchanting gear. No one wants to spend 2-3 days recovering from a PK and it's enough to make some sissies keep from continuing PKing openly.

If you put roadblock NPCs at entrances to cities, bounty NPCs don't have to spawn anymore, because any attack has to come in via the regular entrances. Yelling and warnings on the tribunal channels would give you more than enough time to get ready to get away in this scenario -- or to move to your regroup point (aforementioned 'crystal' or a guard post) and get ready.


It is being addressed. I literally won't even reply to this argument because none of it is applicable.


I've seen a couple of groups do this the last couple of days with no real difficulty.


You don't need your FACTION to help you, you need to MAKE FRIENDS who can help you. If you are playing in such a way that you are alienating everyone around you and thus cannot find help outside of your faction, you might want to reconsider your playstyle.


Because all bounty NPCs do is spawn incessantly and waste money and game resources (I am talking physical resources, like CPU cycles to calculate when they should load every time), they spawn in random, awful locations that you don't really need to protect when there are plenty of guards there that ought to warn you already (see: Tlaxcala, for example), they post pretty much no major threat to anyone except a random criminal who might be solo (and the constant spawning would make it difficult for them to realistically have a chance to evade the law right now)...


Why would they join cabals right now, then, if they don't get a pet?

I don't think you understood the proposed system at all (irrecoverable crystals?). The point is one big NPC that just makes an area (in this case, a city) no transport. When the NPC dies, your city's "open" for ~36 IC hours, or until combat has ceased for ~12.

Areas right now are already swiss cheese anyways. c gate Gusgil, sw. There's a reason hardly anyone stays at inns anymore: they are the least safe places in the game.


Tribunals aren't underpowered. Especially not right now.


Conversely, why would he want to join any other group? Joining Guardians does not instantly mean you cannot have friends in your religion, or friends elsewhere that you are willing to work with. I don't understand your complaint: it seems to me like you think that the only people you can ever be helped by are the people in your direct organization.


It is a beneficial change to make because, right now, the only real way to "save" yourself is to have word of recall with you. People don't even try getting away normally, they just quaff to safety. People don't go into fights with the intent to finish them, they just want to see if they can swing it in their direction before they make the decision to word away or not.

Either way, you have a very odd way of viewing how the game works. Forcing people to stay and fight also means the vets -- who will be the first to quaff away if the fight turns sour -- will also die more. This means that fights will go from being mostly engage, combat, recall, to engage, combat, flee and attempt to shake followers, or engage, combat, finish.

As for enchanting: shrug. You must not read the forums much.


I already suggested cities into fortresses. Bounty NPCs have to be eliminated. Being able to move around the countryside quickly is fine: you want the city to be the hard-to-navigate place.


If you play a class that can't tank, it doesn't matter what organization you're in -- you realize this, right? You still can't tank. Tribunals shouldn't exist to give you access to a tank. Just because they improve you doesn't mean they ought to improve everyone else at the rate that they do. Some classes can have a multitude of tanks right now (Sorcerer can have a charm + tribunal NPC + pet, for instance, while Warlock can have an elemental + tribunal NPC + pet, etc.) and NPC wars are ... lame.


Correct. If you are playing in an empty and therefore do not actually have the bodies to go to war, then you should not be going to war. Make concessions, or make allies. Being a tank would make no difference for you. If you are not comfortable with playing that out, then I don't know what to tell you. I am sure tribunals will get some kind of love soon, though.



Yes, so to reiterate, don't everyone get ragin' cajun angry about some things you think will be changing. This is shooting the breeze: brainstorming for the benefit of all. If something here produces a great idea that Dulrik enjoys, then all the better for us.

Gates wouldn't necessarily be very strong -- guards at choke points serve the purpose of being roadblocks, but are otherwise not as strong as PCs. Think of the outer guardians: no one is really scared of those.

What sucks is just people farming bounty NPCs away from the capital safely and people feeling like inns are unsafe.

What is this. I don't even.

Did you READ Jerin's post?

The problem is having 5 pcs walking in to engage your group while you are stuck killing NPCs/etc who even if they do [REDACTED] for damage, still spam bash/trip/dirt/etc and will likely take up a few rounds of your group's melee.

Nobody is afraid of an outer guardian no. But nobody is going to fight an outer guardian and let an equally sized group of PCs jump them. That's just dumb.

Syn is right. Stop and think for a second about Duradune and Minos Ionia gate fights on Everwar, Sargas. They never happened unless the enemy team had enough firepower to not only overpower the NPCs at the gate, but also all of the enemy players. Otherwise, the defenders simply waited for the gates to be engaged and then steamrolled the attackers.

It would be no different on SK. No one will engage these "choke points" unless their side has enough firepower to deal with both the NPCs and any enemy players that might show up, too. This won't change anything or encourage PK. If anything, it will make PK less frequent.