Shattered Kingdoms

the current crs system is better than adding a bunch of mazes, siege camps and other wile e coyote nonsense. it definitely does not need to drag out for rl days at a time - lulz.



kid if u want to see trolling - check the who lists lately

Oh, I have. If you can't figure out who I am that is your issue.

u know ur pretty awesome when u quote urself. one of the few redeeming qualities of the current crs is that it only takes about 5 to 30 minutes from start to finish depending on the competency of the characters involved. all of these terribad suggestions lately that would make crs drag out for hours or even dayz rl time need to go straight in the dumpster.

if ur solution to "fix" crs involves dragging it out for an extended amount of rl time - u need to think again.

Can anyone posting these scooby doo moba features even list all the CRS conflicts that happened in 2014? I suspect few of these suggestions are well-grounded.

To evaluate any CRS developments, it is necessary to first determine the goals and scope of CRS. You cannot really evaluate if something is an improvement to a process without first identifying the output of that process. It is also important to take careful stock of available resources.

For example, if we think CRS is about engaging, competitive gameplay and that SK's building tools had what WoW refers to as phasing, then we might conceive of a system where Uxmal can be "claimed" by a faction in a transition from CTF to KOTH gameplay.

However, while Baldric's assessment of the purpose of CRS may well explain what motivated CRS, it doesn't quite frame the scope of CRS. CRS is an optional tool to use when optional diplomatic features have been activated by mortal leaders in optional factions in an optional game. At any given moment, there are only a maximum of four humans who can direct a CRS scenario; in most permutations, however, hierarchical leadership structures realistically halve that number down to only two players. Everyone else is along for the ride and can choose between loving it, leaving it, or whining about it at any given moment.

If CRS could be said to fail, then CRS fails because players don't use it appropriately. There's nothing coding, scripting, or even enforcement can do about that.

What would improve CRS is what would improve the rest of faction-based RPPK: more accessible, regularly used public and private channels of asynchronous, in-character communication between members of a faction and leaders of factions with transparent immortal oversight.

Everything else is vaporware brainstorming.

Look:

Subject: Vote: Best changes to retain/excite existing players



It's obvious that we're seeing developments of these items and are not necessarily seeing revisions to those developments before the list is done. For example, we needed a mediawiki deployment a year ago, but we're making due with the area guide forum. We ought to expect different items on this list before dynamic CRS content, which is not on the list, should be attempted.

Grep, "change" CRS is #5 on the list. Is your point that they've already made some changes and are moving on to other things on the list before revising their changes?

One of the problems I had with this game is that it doesn't matter how much of a badass your character is and how many teeth you kick in, really. At the end of the day, you haven't conquered any lands or left a legacy. I understand there are exceptions that can be pointed to, but you'd be talking about very few instances, and they required heavy IMM involvement. I'd be very interested in seeing a coded system in place that allowed the game world to reflect which factions are winning in the PvP arena.

Ways of "winning" are:
1) Ganking a relic - Not worthwhile as it will be ninja ganked by the time you log back in, probably. And besides, the enemy can just keep spam dying and not surrendering, and you haven't gained anything.
2) Ganking the enemy into deletion. - Not desirable as it is detrimental to the game as a whole.
3) The other side surrendering. - Very few players will actually surrender, regardless of how much they're getting beaten.

I mean, why do people bother fighting in this world? There is pretty much nothing a character can gain from fighting except maybe getting some loot that makes them better at fighting. There's no glory to be had, land to be conquered, legacies to build, etc.

I've never had a problem with CRS exactly. My problem has been that CRS was supposed to help address the whole "no way to win" problem, but it doesn't. Something like Trosis's idea might, and shouldn't get tossed out without a solid argument against it.

Yes, that is mostly my point. We are not seeing developments on the list revisited once implemented, and not rushing to tweak changes before seeing how they play out is probably not a bad thing.

The solid argument against Trosis' idea is that it's just more of the same mistakes: machine-based PVE automation. If it didn't work in CRS before, how will more of it somehow perform differently exactly? If we were to realistically audit all of the problems with CRS, we would find that all of the problems can be traced to individual human behaviors and choices. Making Wintergrasp in SK wouldn't have any realistic practical relevance to that as a response. It might be a cool feature, but it is non-sequitur to the challenges of CRS. Trosis' idea would just be another cheap WoW imitation in a game environment completely not designed for nor balanced with the MMO paradigm.

The community-at-large could stand to rethink winning. The only way to win is to have fun. The problem of CRS, if it could be said to have any, is that it makes fun an even more limited resource than it would be without it: it is a Gygaxian system whose reward is just the use or removal of a punishment. However, if we look at CRS as an optional, short-term departure from normal RPPK procedures, it's obvious that CRS should not be something you want to engage in if you can avoid it nor something you automatically want to do if you can win it. It is a diplomatic tool whose threats and nuances have gone largely ignored and underutilized by players whose metagame, jaded thinking sidesteps the RP aspects of faction diplomacy.

In essence, paying for siege camps, mazes, or control of the Wintergrasp Fortress are all just euphemisms for the "auto rp" feature suggested by others. Based on engaging in more CRS than the rest of the mud last year, I can report that CRS pains are just symptoms of a relatively low (or compromised) capacity for diplomatic roleplaying. These symptoms would emerge no matter what the system looked like and are not addressed by any changes to that system, because the system itself isn't the infection site.

As to the original post, this is more an idea of how to get tribunals to admit defeat than it would be for cabals.

Given the scope of kingdoms and players, there really is no such thing as "defeat" in any conclusive sense. Creating a place of shifting power -- making some sort of Uxmal Wintergrasp -- would be a very significant degree of progress. I just don't see the resources on Dulrik's end to make such a system and then on our collective end to actually produce enough warm-bodied diversity to really participate in it.

An easier improvement to the current game would be to remove tribunals, imprisonment, and bounty NPCs entirely.

I would not call #5 done just because a bug was fixed and we changed it to retain 3 instead of 5 abilities.

When looking at potential changes, I think an important thing to keep in mind is how much work the change would take to implement. Something requiring a lot of coding work would take a long time to get done and would require a large investment on Dulrik's part.

If we try to think of creative solutions which do not require as much coding, I think we'll have better luck seeing a change.