Shattered Kingdoms

I wish you were an IMM so you could see how funny some of these comments were. Right. I'm pretty sure I've added entire chunks of low-tier weapons and then never seen them used. I am sorry if not everyone notices the useless weapons being added. I guess there might be a reason?


I would wish that you could separate "Immortals" from "coders" because none of the staff are involved in code issues except Dulrik. Quit ragging on the entire group when we aren't even responsible for these things.

How hard have you personally pushed to get subtypes balanced? It's very, very low priority for our current staff.

You actually don't know - but we've pushed for the reworking of several things - not just weapon subtypes. I've also removed certain instances of subtypes from the game and replaced them with others - but I'm fairly sure that's gone unnoticed as well.

It's not that it's a low priority, it's that no one aside from a coder can change such things - like Achernar said.

The fact that you just saying "we've pushed for the reworking of several things" means that it isn't a high priority. Reworking subtypes should be on the top priorities of coding right now, and it clearly isn't - seeing as we have seen the introduction of a barely used race and a barely used class since subtypes were introduced.

You're missing our repeated inflections of immortals vs. coders here. There are a number of immortals on staff. There is only one coder. Therefore it can be said (and once again, it was, in so many words), the priorities of the immortals, are not always the priorities of the coder. I'm really not sure how else I can spell this out.

Gilgon just doesn't understand how D operates.

It has been years since the changes to any subtypes. The immortals clearly have been exerting almost no pressure at all upon Dulrik to change things. Instead, they have been pushing for other things that affect a much, much smaller portion of the mud.

"Balance" in this mud has been extremely low even on the priorities of our immortals, as can be seen where the immortals have not set any absolute rules on which items their builders are allowed to put into the game. Cold-iron ahlspiess', pitchforks, and battlespears, were those discussed with all of the builders before they were put in? How about the introduction of one-handed no-dachis into the game? Any stirring debate among the imms about changing Kuniyoshi's shop? Anything regarding changing the magari yari's and yari's so that we now have diamond hunting spears readily available?

There has been a lot of work done by our builders and our imm staff, but an extremely small portion of it is related to game balance.

That was a largely cosmetic change, and was done by yours truly. The only PHYSICAL change, as you might say, was the removal of the wakizashi, of which there are more than 8 instances of in the game, and the addition of a sai - of which there were less than 5 unique instances of in the game.

What it really comes down to, is that you want something to complain about - even when the situation is something happening that you supposedly want (the addition of underrepresented weapons in this case), you will STILL complain about it.

EDIT: And yes, there was debate about the shop itself and whether such customization had in the past, and would be in the future, abused. Not just one debate, either. Despite that you seem to think you get it, you just don't. We don't code. We can do nothing code-wise about balance issues. Please give this topic line a rest, because it's like hitting a brick wall.

The addition of underrepresented weapons is a BAD thing, not a good thing. Because we have no coder who is balancing weapon specializations the only balance we can ever achieve is through underrepresenting the best subtypes. This is no longer a viable technique for game balance due to our immortal staff.



Dulrik didn't make the above listed items - immortals did.

Adding more underepresenting weapons won't change a thing. What needs to be done is the already implemented weapons to start to change subtypes, so that the elite subtypes will be rare(as intended to be) and not very common.

When builders started adding up too many khopeshes/bspears/kamas/etc in SK, things went down when it came to balance. Khopesh for example, being one of the best 1 handed no reach options of the game(the other is kama, but as an exotic it has other penalties) was really limited when the weapon subtypes were implemented. Actually, up until 2.5-3 years ago, there was only 1 adamantite khopesh out there, 4 copies of a mithril one and the rest was tanso or lower quality.

What happened since then?

Every good area must have a good scripted weapon added. This weapon of course has to be an elite subtype. So we have HP regen water khopeshes, we have an HP battery diamond khopesh, we have generally TOO many khopeshes. Not to mention whiney players bitching to their buddy imms to change weapons to khopeshes and suddenly this happening(*cough* energy archangel swords *cough*).

So now that there is an abundance of khopeshes, it's obvious that everyone will try to use them and spec in them, because it's so easy to get his hands on them.

So refer to my signature.

PS: When A'van was getting revamped the first time(not when wert tried to), I got to see all the lewt that was added to it even though it was a restricted area(<3 teleport). What I saw was full adam suits(that SK doesn't need any more for sure), tanso khopeshes on lvl 35 NPCs and generally more phat lewt. Thank god all the changes were reverted, else we would literally see every merc in SK dressed in full adam with a khopesh, without worries about spam dying because he could full re-equip within 5 mins with more adam and a new khopesh.