Shattered Kingdoms

Periodically we have a debate on how to make people not want or not feel like they have to GM really fast before they can do anything else so I thought I'd toss out an idea.

Might have been proposed before, I don't remember if it was but I thought about it today.

The main reason people want to GM is so that they can use enchanted gear without losing their loot. Well, if we removed enchantments raising the level of the gear you're enchanting, this would pretty much nullify many people's reasons to speed level.

There would still be reasons to GM of course. Scouts need it to tame pets and get herbs. You still couldn't use the gear that was naturally GM without losing it to theives, etc.

One of the things Dulrik has always said he wanted was for characters to be complete at master. A master with fully enchanted gear can certainly hold his on against a grand master.

GM's would still have an advantage of being able to use the elite scripted gear that masters can't keep and if this went into effect the imm staff could probably sort through the scripted gear in the game and up their levels some. But this would certainly go a long ways, for me personally anyway, in eliminating the desire to GM in 50 hours.


EDIT - BTW a side effect of this would be that it would make leveling at lower levels a lot easier, something we all want since you could get your newbie weapon enchanted without fear of losing it.

Five stars. Wickedly good idea.

I am really interested in hearing the opposition to this, because the immediate reaction makes me want to jump on the bandwagon. It might be just a bit too much, but perhaps there can be a small limit to how much things can be enchanted? I'm not really sure. If it is considered too much, maybe you could get a five to ten level buffer with enchants?

It would be outstanding if this caused the power leveling to slow down and we saw some more lowbie wars.

I agree with Gremlin here on this. I would really love to see some possible lowbie wars.

cannibal if anything that will make you more likely to gm, based on the fact that leveling will be a joke with a 10/10 weapon.

I disagree. I'd rather see skills that require GMing to be fully useful (such as the good herbs) made more accessible at lower levels and leave uber-enchanted suits for the GMs or high champions. I would, however, support making it easier to hold lightly enchanted objects so that journeyman and under characters could get a few enchants.

Ive always liked the idea of enchanting not making something harder to keep from thieves. The fact that it doesnt level up when you enchant means that a cap is already on the item because the chance of something blowing up runs off number of enchants vs level of the item. People would still want to be GM to have things that could hold more enchants.

How ever the draw back is that people use end up using second tear items get the short end of the stick because their gear will never enchant as well as the higher level gear. It will never reach level fifty no matter how many times you fade it.

Perhaps an extra spell to improve quality of an item per cast for sorceror only. Making the distinction between priestly enchanting and sorceror enchanting.

The problem with enchanting not adding levels is it allows more enchanting in general. It really is a powerful ability that already makes much equipment's native enchantments ho-hum. You're going to enchant it out the kazoo anyway.

How about a solution that affects both GM levelling and enchanting? Let GMs lose items that are enchanted higher than level 50. That'd put a practical limit on enchanting, and also get rid of a lot of the incentive to make 50.

I attempted to think of a bit of opposition to this, and there wasn't much. I'm in favor of this idea. Leveling at lower levels isn't that hard already. Yes, this would help the twinks, but since they already have good setups leveling, this would have a much greater impact to the newbies. Will this decrease the amount of time it takes to level? The answer is: most definitely. Does it matter? Depends...

If this were to be implemented (which I'd love to see), I'd love to see another restriction on champ/GM chars. Personally, I've felt a GM char should only be GM if they have played so many hours, and done so much. In other words, you earn your GM, not get it when your char is two RL weeks old. Perhaps, to GM, you must receive two-five small enlights, or have played so many total hours instead of being able to GM based purely on XP. I can go in deeper, but at the moment, I'm too tired to think coherently...

sleeper

I disagree that you need GM to get good enchants on your armor. I've seen newbie school gear take a lot of enchants, and jman/veteran characters could still keep them afterwards too. Sure, you may have to settle for worse material than the best your class can wear, but it seems to be a reasonable tradeoff for a master level character. I'd personally skip over unenchanted adamantite for well-enchanted tanso.

As for the speed leveling issue, I think it's a bad idea to lessen people's desire to reach grand master. It's a good thing for players to have an achievable goal. I also think that the difference between 41 and 50 should be palpable, and if you lessen it too much then you might as well cap everyone at master. I think the real problem is that grinding/questing is the most efficient method to GM a character, and since it is boring, repetitive, and getting progressive nerfs with each update, people aren't having as much fun as they used to.

Nobody should be blamed for using the most effective method for GM either. The proper way to solve this is to change the most efficient route into what you want the players to do.

I suggest placing a level cap tied to the number of rewards obtained by a character. 1 enlight = level 41, 2 enlights = level 42, and so forth. No fancy coding required, just a straight count of all the rewards in a character's lifetime. So someone with enough experience to GM is capped at 40 until he gets his first reward, and someone with 10 rewards at Mentor can go wild and plevel to GM if he wants to. This would provide a very strong hint that you should be RPing on the way to a grand master character. It will also shift the levels towards RPers and away from the plevelers (who can still grind to 50 despite all the recent leveling nerfs, I might add). It will eliminate the problem of hitherto unknown GM characters coming out of nowhere.

You can even explain this ICly, that only people blessed with divine wisdom can reach the highest levels of their craft. And if this is implemented, maybe we can ease back on the XP slowdown effort and make grinding a little more enjoyable.