Shattered Kingdoms

(Yes, I know that's not how agnosticism works.)

Gentlemen, I am back. Maybe. Depends on if I can get into this character and stuff. I'm arguing with my friends to get them to play too but they're all "noooo I wanna play league of legends and D&D" and I'm all "ugh fine but you're never gonna get laid like that, this [REDACTED] is a chick magnet for real." I hope you're all doing great and stuff, although I really don't give a crap because you're horrible people, etc.

Seriously though, enchanting. I saw someone suggest pay-for-enchant back in GD, and I was like "verily, what an excellent idea thou hast happened upon!" Except, then I remembered NPC Wars (tm) and how money-oriented it used to be (might still be that way, iunno), and I realized that adding money-for-enchants would probably just put too much emphasis on that and make the problem worse.

Here's the thing with grinding, though: people don't mind doing it on their own so much. Doing it with other people isn't much better, especially with enchanting, which is, shall we say, a particularly unenchanting experience. (Jada: "DOH HO HO HO HO!") Personally, I'm pretty much fine with grinding out levels on my own as long as I can keep up a reasonable rate of progress, and the same applies to money and equipment. Doing repetitive things with other people doesn't make them any less repetitive, though, and it makes it so that you have to pay attention to the boring stuff instead of just alt-tabbing till it's done, or at least I do. When other people are on the game, I want to do something EXCITING with them, like RP or PK or mudsex or seduce them into giving me their numbers and sexually harassing them over the phone at odd hours until they finally call the cops on me and I'm forced to change my identity, undergo facial reconstructive surgery, and slice off my fingerprints in order to evade law enforcement, thus necessitating a painful period of recovery where I am unable to play text-based games or masturbate.

...well that got off-track pretty quickly.

Returning to my point, I don't want to have to do boring things with other people. I want to be able to do boring things by myself so that I can do exciting things with other people, which both provides me with a reason to stay on and wait for other people to log on when there are none already, and with encouragement to interact with them when they DO come online.

Ssssooooo, I figure I'd like something that would allow me to put time into grinding enchantments without adding yet another point in favor of Shattered Kingdoms: where finances and bean-counting collide. As you no doubt guessed when you read the poll options and then skipped the entirety of my teal deer, I figure this problem is solvable via enchanting quests. The exact how and where of it is obviously up for debate, but I would suggest that, for starters, it have quest-givers/enchanters in all major cities and maybe a few more locations that the IMMs would like to see more traffic in, who would offer enchantments of a middling-to-low quality (expert or mentor level seem reasonable to me) in exchange for certain quest items. One might receive a higher spell level in exchange for more difficult-to-obtain tokens, although that's only a timid suggestion that I definitely did not think out for more than five seconds. Additionally, somehow restricting the quests based upon character level seems like it might be a good idea to me, but then again with item thieves it might not be an issue.

I'd like to stress that this should not at all be competitive with player enchanting, nor should it allow anyone to get a ridiculous suit on their own via NPCs. This should at most provide players with a way to obtain items with minimal-but-functional enchantments, to the tune of 4 or so per piece, and maybe +4/+4 weapons.

I won't say that this will "fix" the current system, or that it wouldn't require tweaking, but ideally it should provide players with a way to spend their private time obtaining equipment that will allow them to remain minimally competitive (read: not completely pathetic) without becoming unstoppable.

As a final note, I'm perfectly willing to write up descriptions et cetera if there is an IMM willing to implement it, and I bet plenty of others would be too. I think this could be done by a builder without any coding necessary, and hopefully without a great deal of hassle outside of what's normally required for a high-quality quest.

inb4 ardith calls me [REDACTED]

I thoroughly enjoyed both reading that post, and the suggestion.

Welcome back!

I'm pretty sure LPP took a full year off from SK just so he could write that post.

I didn't read the actual suggestion very carefully. I skimmed over that part to get to the jokes. My understanding is that you want to implement some way for people to grind solo to obtain minimally enchanted suits. That seems like a good idea to me.