Shattered Kingdoms

The wastelands as it used to be, with that portal so easy to get to, almost made me quit the mud with my first character. To many lowbie characters would wander in there and get slaughtered in less than three seconds.

It needed to be changed so that things like that didn't happen. Believe it or not, SK is much more newbie friendly than it used to be, at least from a coding and building perspective. You're less apt to get killed by giant red ticks, wastelands creatures, and wandering deep-elfning priestesses.

What gets you are players these days. There are fewer of them, and they all tend to be trigger happy.

If you want to make SK easier for newbies and lowbies, you need to find a way to convince players that it is worth their time and effort to sit and help them. The RP reward system and mentor system are steps in the right direction, but ultimately the veteran players of the game get sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over and resort to their PKing and powergaming. It's fun for them afterall.

Some changes that let powergamers focus their energies in other ways may go a long way in improving the quality of life for noobs, but as it stands now, PK is the final outlet for most people once they achieve their GM status.

I'd start by making the economy system worth something.
*Introduce a bounty system for tribunals that lets them collect/distribute bounties for wanted players.
*Introduce trade skills. Give players the choice to further customize their character AND find new players to contribute to their trade efforts. A blacksmith will need a mine worker, a tanner needs hides, an alchemist needs blown-glass bottles, etc. It might encourage high level characters to seek out lower level characters with the time and desire to help. This seems to work wonders on some MMORPGs I've seen.

I'm running out of steam on this. Maybe more later.

I have suggested a similar idea before! To allow anyone to goto a bounty hunter's guild, and do: bounty dimmel 50000 alive, which would take 50 obsidians from inventory, deposits it into the guild, rewarded when players can take Dimmel to the judge. Or bounty dimmel 50000 dead, for a kill.

Dulrik's response was something along the lines of: It may turn out to be a novelty feature such as duel system we have, that may not last. Other players mentioned they can already do 'bounties', which were fair enough. More important things to focus on.

I'll admit to stealing the idea from you.

A system that actually confirms dead bodies and delivers a verified amount of money would be a pretty nice addition to a system where money is now finite. It might help further the idea of making money mean more.

He could be right though. It may go the way of the duel system.

I don't particularily care for the bounty system. I don't like things that make this game more of a game and less of a fantasy world. What I'd like to see is more RP. I'd like to see higher powered characters have a greater impact on the game itself. Like in a fantasy novel. Powerful people have a profound impact on the events around them.

The imms have been doing a great job of getting involved in assisting players over the past year or so. I'm almost afraid to ask for more since I don't want the imms to burn out and loose interest. Near as I can tell Achernar has been the vanguard of this new breed of immortals.
Honesty, what I'd like to see is long term, high level characters able to affect their environment in significant ways. Like say a level 50 fighter who lives to be 60 or 70 might get to build himself a small keep. The keep could be destroyed or fall into disrepair and become nothing but ruins after the character dies or is deleted.

Say once the character is gone you can tweak the room desc to let people know that the extinct line of so and so once had a keep here but it has since fallen into disrepair and nothing but blocks of stone and rubble remain of it.

Does anyone remember those old D & D boxed sets? They kicked [REDACTED] I had them all. Right from that red one to the one where your characters can actually become gods after a time. Loved those boxed sets. Just saying that makes me want to go find them and buy them again somewhere. Anyway, the point is once you got rich and famous you had stuff you could do. Fighters could build a keep, wizards a tower.

So what I'm suggesting is that there be made some way to enoble players, maybe each kingdom could have it's own nobility with certain rankings you could earn. Possibly you could earn these rankings through annual imm sponsored events like the hero tourneys. Each noble ranking will give players priveledges of some kind.

Say a duke could build a small keep. A "knight" could get a squire NPC of low level to play with. I donno. It's a big system. To be honest, I'd rather see coded nobility then coded heroe's It's more realistic.

Roughly, the idea goes like this. You have character levels, and you can progress through those. How about you can also have nobility levels.

Serf
peasant
Squire
Knight
Baronet
Baron
Duke
Prince
King

Each "nobility ranking" would give you certain rights and priveledges. That way instead of mindlessly PKing people, or trading relics endlessly. People could quest for nobility rankings. Rankings that give there characters priveledges in the "real world" of Pyrathia. What these priveledges are I haven't decided yet, and it wouldn't really be my decision to make anyway in all likelyhood.

This is a rough idea of something you could give to high level characters to do. Quest or somehow earn nobility levels. Possibly you can't gain these levels until level fifty. Or more likely you would be able to start earning them at amature, but they would be difficult quests to do. Possibly quests that change through the years as well like the DQ questions. I donno.

As Salak knows, I don't give away how exactly mentor points are given out. However, if I were a mentor, I would be doing everything I can to help out a newbie, including guiding them to new places to level.

Didn't that crazy old guy at the portal warn you that something bad was on the other side? As for the ticks and such that used to wander the wilderness, that damned lion in Zhenshi is FAR worse than anything I ran into back then.

What happend to bringing back heros?

the zhenshi lion is related to Areos the Firecat.

Well, as mentioned I liked when the mud wasn't so restricted as it is now a days.

By the way, noone answered my question as to why it should be insanely hard to level a gray aura sprite rogue?

Grey is the hardest alignment to level, simply because you never get the extra xp. The extra xp is what you get for killing an NPC that is a complete opposite of your alignment. This is why it is harder.