Shattered Kingdoms

Hello IMM staff and Pbase.

Love the game, but have a few gripes that I wanted to get off my chest...

Here we go:
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1. DIRT - Why is it that I can have a maxed Dex Half-elf Swashie, yet a street dog, child, or spider can still dirt me literally EVERY TIME? Also, why is it that anything other than a Human and Giant, I can rarely land a dirt on? Very frustrating.

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2. NPCs CHEATING W/ NON SPELL POWERS- (Exhibit a, b, and c)

Exibit A - HOLDPERSON - Not a spell... why do NPCs get it? Also, why does it land so easy?

Exibit B - CONFUSION - As far as I can tell, not an actual spell either. Yet this nearly always lands on my Vet priest and Master Swashie characters (barring my trip or pet bash). It is not fun, and frankly unfair to have NPCs employ ability and powers that are not available to normal character generation. It is almost an auto kill every time some weak mage or priest lands this and I go around the room attacking larger characters. Lame.

Exhibit C - MAGICAL WHIRLWIND/TELEPORT/HEAL POWER - THis is by far the lamest thing I have ever seen on a MUD. It reminds me of when I was a kid playing D&D and the DM would get tired and start making stuff up to bypass the rules.
If my character is strong enough or resourceful enough to take down the Gypsy merchant or the Leprechaun, why can't he or she do so? Why not let these NPCs be under the same rules? Even if you left the Teleport thing, why the whirlwind/teleport that bypasses trips and bashes, or the mysterious cheating auto heal that they get after escaping? Why do you have these characters outside the rules?

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3. ECONOMY - I like the economy cycles very much. But since they are in place now, can you guys (IMMS) take down all the other restrictions that we face with merchants? For instance nearly all of the merchants will NEVER buy goods from our characters. This is very frustrating, and makes many areas not used. These types of restricted areas feel dead to the rest of the MUD. Perhaps make each merchant able to buy stuff? Why not let the restrictions be the economy?

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4. LEVELING - I like the new area flags and the experiance bonuses and penaltys. I think it is brilliant. However, since this is now in place and forcing us to travel and explore for other training grounds, can we perhaps make all NPCs have some sort of XP value? There are many areas with creatures or NPCs/NPCs that should technically be of value for me to fight but do not give experience to my characters. This is making leveling much less fun that it should be.


That is it. These are some of the things that I personally would like to see fixed. I think the MUD would be a much more fun without them.

1) I agree on the Dirt thing and other similar abilities. No matter how far from Mastered a PC has a skill, NPCs land it much more often on a dex-Maxed swashie, than you land it on then. I haven't seen an appreciable difference in success of such skill use between a dex 14 human and a dex 22 helf.

Does every monster out there have 25 dex and Mastered Dirt Kick? And even if it does, why is a PC with the same stats less effective? Hmm.

2) Confusion/Hold, other NPC spells: They are there to stop you from leveling too easily. I can understand the intention, but there should be more measure. Confusion should NOT have a forced attack/flee/move result so often (every 2-3 seconds) and it should also allow you to successfully get a command through more often. Hold is rather lame. It should have a duration composed of rounds, not ticks.

Teleport/Heal/Vanish/Script. This is another example of "added difficulty" to accomplish certain things on the MUD. If you have enough people with you, you can actually (after grueling loss of your game time) succeed in stunning/defeating above-mentioned NPCs.

3) Surely not all merchants should buy anything from you. They're trying to sell specific merchendise, and it makes sense that they won't buy anything irrelevant, or anything at all for that matter. Peddlers rarely buy. But there -should- be more a merchant or two in most city areas that is actually a trader, and buys particular sorts of equipment.

Solution to this: Just wait till the few merchants who buy stuff for decent prices empty their stock, and then sell to them. Rince, repeat.

4) I always wondered why this is. The XP gaining curve drops too sharply when a NPC is equal match and lower. But that is and has been the MMORPG and online game philosophy for ages. I doubt it will change in SKs.

Dirt kicking is based upon formation. The closer you and your enemy are to each other in formation, the higher the success chance of it actually succeeding.



Much like me, NPCs cheat so that you don't have to.



The immstaff would need you to idea log or typo log things that you might think need fixing. However, shopkeepers tend only to buy things similar to what they are selling.




They should be giving you xps. If they are not then they are most likely bugged.

Oops, I did not communicate this clearly. I did not mean to say that they all should buy everything from us, but rather that they buy things, and the next day be able to buy more of whatever their specialty is. Similar to the Pawn shop in function only.

I am talking one on one here. Low level NPCs can dirt better than my mastered level and Maxed Dex half-elf. There is something lopsided here.

Dirt kick: The calculation is done the same way for NPCs and PCs. You don't really know how successful they are because you can't see when they are failing their skill check. They might be dirt kicking you every possible round and only succeeding once out of four tries. Most PCs will just give up if they don't land one or two.. NPCs are stubborn.

Regarding spells: Spells like confusion and hold person are real spells and as such they can be resisted by high saving throws or disrupted by bashing or dishing out lots of damage on the offending NPC. Someday you might see some of these spells duration measured in rounds instead of ticks.

Economy: Making more shops buy things is something we are already thinking about for certain kingoms.

Levelling: Which NPCs will give you experience should be very predictable already. You get the best experience from fighting something much stronger than you that is of the opposite alignment. As you deviate from that profile you will get less. I do have some other ideas about new ways to gain experience but I think the current fighting calculations are fine.

I'm curious to see whether the average level per character has risen or dropped since familiarity was implemented. I've not really dedicated myself to levelling a new character since the changes, but I think this stat would be an indication of how familiarity affects the typical player.

I've always been a fairly lousy leveler, but I think that the familiarity system has helped me to level faster. However, this could just be because it's forced me to find some of the other good leveling areas.

It's hard to come up with really good numbers but I looked for averages from the numbers that we track. From each month I took the sum of the levels from all characters in the game and divided by the number of characters in the game to come up with an average level. Then I averaged that number over the last 4 months and the 4 months immediatly prior to the familiarity system being added.

December 2005 - March 2006: Average Level 17.97
July 2006 - October 2006: Average Level 16.81

There's a noticable difference there, but it's small enough that the difference might be due to lots of other factors such as time of year. These numbers might be more relevant if I could pull out level 1 characters who were never actually played, but I don't have that data.

The number is smaller because I have kept one character for the last 6 months, kthnx.