Shattered Kingdoms

I don't know enough about the game, so perhaps this may help. Maybe not but can I get a definition of what is meant by playing competently, when applying it to playing a character.

Just an FYI...I've been playing SK for...5-6 years? The 2 leader flags I got in the past month or so are the /only/ time I've ever had Leader aside from Ravaelana.

And when I joined the Talons I was one of ONLY two people in the faction. And it was Tristala's idea. I didn't say jack about it.

Lay off, please.

It wasn't a personal attack. I'm aware both of those times you literally fell into leadership because you happened to create at the right place and time, and you probably don't even like it (at least not enough to not delete). I think your characters are fine, but I think you should try a long-lived character one day! Sorry if it came off that way, I'm attacking the system, not those who can work the system.

Ealuriel was 169. AND got kicked out of the MC like 17 times.

Though honestly, yeah, I know what you mean.

I think Eddy made a good point.

If we look at leveling like a minigame, what are the rules?


Something like:
"Spam this command until this thing is dead."
"Find another thing, repeat."
"Make sure you don't die."

If you win, your only immediate reward is to have to do less of it. Or more, if you want to train your skills/spells...

If you lose, you die, and potentially lose a lot.

It just doesn't seem like a very enticing game for the amount of it we're asked to play.

If I were building new areas or revamping old ones, I'd focus on making huge, grandiose quest chains that got you through entire status ranks with some combat, no spambat, and required applications of out-of-combat skills. Dulrik's already given us the mechanic by which the boringness of the XP grind can be fixed, which could potentially more than make up for familiarity.

I can almost guarantee that if you took the initiative to design said chains, desc all the NPCs, items, and areas necessary, and potentially pseudo-coded all the scripts necessary, that it would be put in the game by a builder in short order.

Calls in the past have been made for such monumental works, but very few players are actually willing to take on the responsibility for them.

yap build it greppy

den dey migh put it in da stew

huh? I'm confused. I thought winning would mean you get to participate in the rest of the game, because you'd be GM. And losing would mean you have to get a quick rez?

And, Jennbo, nobody said anything about having to GM in a week. If it takes 100 hours to GM, there's no reason you can't spread that out over 3 months and average about 1 hour a day.

And playing a character competently means, in this context, asking people in game where to train, and then using the appropriate skill/spell/pet/whatever available to you to train there.

The bottom line is that the game has a lot of fun to offer. If you focus on one character, and keep it long-lived, you will reach GM in decent time even if you don't quite know what you're doing. This shouldn't seem so bad. If you don't like leveling, don't keep creating characters, leveling them to GM, and then deleting (this comment is directed at Syn).

Wouldn't it just be neat if you could only advance to a certain level depending on age, GM being obtainable at say... half your lifespan.



Although said in jest, it would force GM's to be long-lived characters and could be seen as having age-experience. And even better, what if an apprentice actually had to find a GM to apprentice under?

As for how it is now, I don't seem to have much trouble personally with the system... although thanks to XP loss methods of resurrection, I've hit GM about six times now on one character.

Me responding to comments I read somewhere in this thread:

"Leveling needs to be more interesting."
Good point - please suggest more ways we can accomplish this. Making the enemy NPCs harder either doesn't solve the problem and/or causes a lot of people to whine because now things are too hard. (Although I'm not afraid of making people whine for the right reasons.)

"Make long quest chains."
Yes, we definitely have been pushing on that the last few years. I made big upgrades to the quest system to try to make doing them feel more like you accomplished an achievement. If you go to the interactive webpage that list areas with quests, there are at more than 75 areas that have at least one.

As OA said, it's a lot easier to talk about than get someone to do. At one point I had a spreadsheet mapping out how we wanted to make quests that linked all the major areas together to give you reasons to explore them all, but it is still a lot of work and the focus keeps getting lost. Going to push on this again with the staff, but we'd accept quest write-ups as well.

"Make people have to be around longer before getting GM."
So how do you work this? Do you base it on the age system? There's nothing stopping someone from making 6 characters and letting them age 20 years before actually starting the character. Do you base it online time? That rewards people for scripting themselves to idle online, which is against the rules, but still not something I want to encourage.

What would incentivize people to just hang out and actually play? Maybe some combination of the two or something else entirely?