Shattered Kingdoms

Alright, how about using them to buy attribute points as well. This is something that I would really like to have and have mentioned something similar to this in the past, though the LP system wasn't quite in place yet to attach it there.

I also feel that the limit of certain items should be increased. I'm more thinking about jewelry than weapons and armor. Or perhaps LP could be used to increase one's willpower, fortitude or reflex.. say, 1 point is equivalent to one rune. However, this sort of goes against what you said in regards to making your character better than it already is.. which is why I mentioned an increase to the limit of certain items that aren't considered extremely special. Just a thought.

There is already a system in place that allows you to earn additional attribute points.

SK doesn't have a retention "problem". Many SK users have played this game for a dozen or more years. Sure, the game can get eventually get old for just about anyone, but if we brought in a new user every two months for every one that got bored after a year, you would still see a sky-rocketing player base.


In a nutshell, because I'd rather see people spending MORE time at lower levels instead of less time. Because skipping straight to Master is also skipping all the potential roleplay and experiences that lead to you actually BEING a Master (as both a character AND a player). This mindset that the game doesn't start until Master (or even higher) is a malignant concept that deserves to be crushed.

I'll make this my last comment about attribute points and the mentor system. I don't think the mentor system is a great system. I help as many people as I can with many different things. I do this because that's who I am and how I play. However, it's a fairly big undertaking to try to use the teach system to gain a reward. Not only that, a lot of people who make new characters and alts don't really want anything to do with most people unless they know the person. I get blown off all the time when I offer teaching.

I feel that attribute points are much more useful than pushing a skill to master level and I highly recommend expanding the ability to earn them.

After further thought D, so that it can't be abused to easily but at the same time help Master lvl chars compete. Make it so that Master lvl chars can use their loyalty pts to raise a skill (singular) to master level status.

heck, to take that a step further, make packages of skills and when a character makes it to a certain lvl, they learn those skills to very good, automatically. That in of itself I would pay loyalty pts for.

It's really not as hard as what you may have been led to believe. The fact is, nobody actually understands how the mentor system works, because I've never revealed it. Everything you may have heard is supposition, and half-truths learned through observation. I specifically don't tell people how it works so that they can't game the system. Despite that, people BELIEVE they know how to game the system. Sadly, most everything I've heard on that score is wrong. Just do what you are supposed to do - help newbies however you can - without regard to what you've heard about how it works and mentor points will eventually follow. (And maybe faster than if you listen to what people think.)


This is exactly the reason why I don't want to give them out with loyalty points. The mentor system is trying to do a valuable thing and it deserves a unique and valuable reward.

I've actually undertaken the task, I'm not speaking from what I've been told. I guess the thing about it for me isn't so much that I need transparency of what is needed to accomplish this, so much as I need to know that all the actions I take that conform to what you've said are being tracked 100%. The only ways I can think of for this is A) teaching skills and such is a recorded way to track and B) randomly an immortal will take note when they are online, if you're lucky. Outside of that, I'm not sure how it would be tracked, you know? Time is important and I'm still trying to learn the game myself, as well as help others, though most don't truly need my help as they know far more than I.

I have a dozen or so friends that use their phones, through MXIT, Blowtorch or some other application that I am unaware of, to log onto a mud when doing such a task. They are also quite competitive within the game on the phone. Better when they are at an actual computer, but a phone slows them down marginally.


A few pages back, people were discussing the shared information across characters thing and I recall an instance where someone was punished, hard, for using prior knowledge of the quests in the twisted maze/garden area (when it was open) to get the items ahead of time before going to the area to start the quest. I haven't heard much of such enforcement lately. Either people aren't being caught, there is a lack of desire to enforce or people just aren't doing it. I do not know.


As for what would interest me, crafting skills. This would detract a bit from scouts, but like I suggested in a prior thread that gained no support, when a scout skins something, give the skin a chance to take on some base attributes that the creature had as long as it is above a certain level. Or, even give it a penalty if the attribute was too low. This would give scout skins a slight edge over player crafted armour straight from the forge, or a suit of new, silk clothes.

While I haven't explored even a half of the game, I do think that opening up a new layer of land would go a long way to getting people interested. It doesn't have to be another outer planes. It could be adding layers to the ocean to explore, or previously forgotten/undetected areas underground, or someone found a way to open a way to the moon and there is a race to colonize it. No idea, really. Just something new.

I would say open the deeps up to player starting area, but that has inherent problems from the start. Dwarf and gnome might team up to have a loosely based judicial system, but the deep-elves would want their own, which would make at least two, possibly three, different factions instead of one. Not to mention the lack of players to be part of these tribunal(s). It is an idea that does intrigue me, regardless.

There are other things, but I am not yet sure how to get them from feeling into thought then to words. I'll be back when/if it happens.

I have a few issues regarding leveling.

Though it would be ideal for a setting where "the game doesn't begin at Master", I don't find that this is the case. Almost always, when playing a lower-level character, I end up making connections with other characters both for RP as well as grouping potential. I play support characters so that I can get into group tactics and help out others. However, literally every character I have played has been told time and time again, "go train more" or "you'll be helpful when you're a higher rank" so on and so forth. Essentially, I don't get to do meaningful grouping or support until I'm high level. Whether this is a flaw with the player base or with the game system itself is unknown to me; however, the result is the same. I have to mindlessly grind to Master to actually have any fun that isn't strictly RP interaction.

So what do I do? I grind... and grind... and grind. The whole process is painful, exhausting, tedious, and altogether pointless in my opinion. I'm okay with a slow progression of levels (again, assuming that the ideal "the game doesn't begin at Master" is actually a reality in the game), but making that progression through "spam <spell or skill>, sleep, repeat" ad nauseam saps my soul and will to play. My last four characters never made it to Grand Master because I just didn't have the interest in submitting myself to that sort of grind any longer. Three of them just faded away due to inactivity because the idea of logging on to grind more was daunting and painful. I have even had to warn friends who asked to join me on SK to "beware the mindless leveling system".

In all fairness, I have not played many MUDs outside of SK, so I don't have much points of comparison, but I don't have the time nor patience for leveling the way it currently exists in this game. Sorry, I don't have a better solution available at this time; thus, I feel somewhat unproductive. Nonetheless, my current character, that I made with lots of ambitions and excitement, hasn't been played in a while. Further, whenever I think, "hey, I would like to play some SK now", I just remember how I don't get to group with people, and how tedious leveling is, so I pick up another video game and play that instead.

TL;DR version: I'm a whiny casual.

I've had that experience on both of my characters in the game too. I just don't pay attention to it. So far the only characters I've played are magic users, so they have "some" ability to level without grinding (it's just a different form of grinding - casting spells). The odd Paragon who pays attention to their duty is available too.

I'm going to withhold suggestions, obviously anything to increase RP is good. I like to think that the level of the mud's RP is also in player hands, you make the game what you want. If there isn't RP going on you can bring it to a situation, and force others to react. BUT rewarding RP is a good strategy.

I think the players themselves should celebrate and promote good RP as much if not more than the PvP / PK battles that go on and people measure their digitial worth against. (Even if that is only a shout out on the forums.)

I used to play a mud 20 years ago (that's depressing) that had a think channel that players could use like the prayer channel, but for their internal dialogues. The imms of the mud, who could opt to hear any channel (or turn them off if they were busy - I believe), would often use the think channel dialogues to inform themselves of situations and improve RP, by either taking over an NPC or involving their own characters directly.

I liked it because it gave players and imms a way to flesh out contradictions and subterfuge in characters. The nice-acting evil character (with alterior motives, for example). Or the quiet good character, who is too shy to talk.

That mud had a dedicated team of imms who were mostly RP instigators and who evaluated and enforced the RP of the game. Often macro plots were orchestrated by the imms, and the imms were empowered to shake the world up from time to time.

They built and introduced alternate zones, for example a city that was part of one civilization was rebuilt as a burnt wreck after it was sacked. Similar type of events happened in the other direction. Areas were built up and fortified.

Anyway, all that to say, empowering RP is probably the best way to incite exciting play. (But that responsbility falls on everyone)

Friday the 13th ... bring the flames