Shattered Kingdoms

My problem with the noob areas is that a ton of them have the same aura NPCs. Empire has darkie NPCs, Taslamar has the student things which (used to be) at least lightie, which really [REDACTED] over noob leveling. It would be reeaaaly nice if every noob area had opposit aura crap to speed things up.

to quote dodgeball.

"If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!" -RipTorn

Change the sword to a wrench or anything equally less confusing.

While I appreciate your asthetics tatallion, the sword is obvioulsy confusing for some newbies and yes its been open a long time and I've only created one character there because the place is the worst newbie school on sk.

Visually, it is beautiful. Scriptwise its one of the most well scripted places in the mud. But you went totally overboard with it. The place is located entirely too far from the starting city. Its hard as balls to get out of. The equipment you can get there starting out stinks, which in your defense I believe the weapon subtypes changed after the school was implemented so this would have been something alshain should have updated. I vowed after my last taslamaran that I would NEVER create another character in taslamar just due to the exstreme difficulty in navigating the school.

When I was the peacekeeper leader I made all these arguments known and nothing got done. While I imagine you went through an enormous amount of work on the school, there are just some things that should have been looked over once people got in. While your work is amazing, its for damn sure not perfect. And that is not your fault as a builder, no one knows how an area will truely operate over time until you've had a few hundred people filter through it to smooth over the rough parts.

People are obvioulsy still finding rough parts, smooth them over.

When we are on the point of confusing newbies; why do we have these giant newbie areas? Isn't it more confusing for a newbie who doesn't know anything of the game yet? I would find it intimidating since its so hard to learn your way around and not get lost, and then only to find out you are only in a newbie area and you still got the rest of the mud to figure out. I rather have more areas like the old Taslamaran newbie area with the practice dummies, three rooms, and a trainer NPC. Let the newbie then explore the rest of the city where the other players are around. You really don't need a protected area anymore where only mentors can go, since the player is protected by auto-newbie and can riskless explore the rest of the city without getting jammed by a raid or something.

I agree with Cannibal, still if you insist on having them hold swords, just add some echo to the sword


problem solved.

Just to be utterly clear, and to apologise for any misunderstanding, I really did have my tongue firmly in cheek when I typed the above. I'll confess to being an elitist in certain respects, but I'm an equal opportunties elitist Elitism is something to aspire towards, not be excluded from.

As far as I'm concerned, I could care less what quality you play to, as long as you aspire to better.



They'd still tear through the average newbie character, most of whom don't have parry.

I'm pretty certain if you try and hold one there are scripted echos to tell you in fairly blunt terms it's a really bad choice of weapon. It also disintergrates pretty quickly.

My original intention was to not give the training NPCs severable limbs, which is why I originally set their race type to school monster (innately limbless). If you can't cut the bugger's arm off, he won't drop the sword. If he doesn't drop the sword, you can't play with it because the invigilators whip him away before you get the chance to riffle through his bloodied corpse.

However, somebody subsquently gave the NPCs limbs that you can cut off, presumably to litter up the place and give the students something to eat rather than forcing them to cross the courtyard to go back to the refractory to buy some gruel.

Complete aside, when they added limbs to the NPCs, they should have instead just changed the NPC's race. Seeing "The arm of a school monster lies here" kind of kicks the credibility of the visual illusion in the teeth anyway.

That said, it could be that they just added limbs to the school monster race type, rather than just the Collegium NPCs. So perhaps it wasn't intentional.

In any case, I digress.

I don't entirely disagree with Cannibal, except the wrench part. The arguments that the Collegium is flawed do hold water in a number of places. In my defense, it was my last building project. By the time I constructed it, I'd been out of the playerbase for some number of years.

It was also designed before the weapon changes (though only opened later) and any number of other balancing tweaks, and before the auto-newbie flag.

It is very easy to get out of once you know how and reach level 2... One of the NPCs creates a gate for you if you get a pass from the Warden. I guess that could have been overlooked. At the moment, the only clue to the availability of such a short-cut to Exile is from agreeing to do the bard trainer's quest.

But again, in my defense, it was my last project, at a point in my life when many other things were competing for my attention, so was left rough around the edges with possibly the least testing (aside from the balance of levelling - a lot of work went into that, though much has changed since) and finishing of any of my building projects. Likewise, it was subsequently bereft of my usual nursemaiding and tweaking once it did get opened.

Though it should be said that any of its shortcomings are my fault, and not Alshain's, who was good enough to finish it for me and get it open in the first place.

(edited to add ---> )
Though I have to say, I can't understand how anybody could ever get lost in an area that you could lay out on a piece of graph paper. And I've never built anything that you couldn't; unless my intention was to loose you. But people evidently do, and I guess one of my falibilities as a builder was often failing to recognise that.

Tat, don't know what these peoples problems are but every character I have always goes through Taslamar School, I want to say thanks for the job well done!

Sure its not perfect, but neither is alot of other stuff in this game, or life so we just got to deal.

I think the swords got changed, I was armoured up with full newbie gear too.

First, Tumrall if you notice, he is clawing your char. which means that the weapon isn't doing anything.

Second, I do agree that a true newb to SK would get totally confused and might get frustrated to the point where he wouldn't want to continue playing. Possible, yes. Probably, no.

Third, the weapon when picked up should rot. I think the cosmetic look is fine but this is one of the most annoying things that someone can come acrooss being a newb.

My point was that they now hold swords, but claw, which does a [REDACTED] load more damage than the previous dummy swords.