Shattered Kingdoms

I greatly appreciate Nashira's tone and openness to dialogue in this thread.

I feel the need to bring something up that may or may not have already been considered by the IMMs. If the 5 innate enchant as maximum rule is in effect, there won't be gear that is good enough "as is." 5 enchants is not enough to be l33t. You have to add enchantments to it. We all know that in order to properly enchant a suit, you have to acquire it several times due to fading/blowing up. In order to get any use out of gear like Ephialtis' kit, you would need a group of veterans with a whole day at their disposal who were willing to spend that entire day on one other character's gear and were capable of killing Ephialtis over and over and over. This pretty much won't happen. The portal rings made it possible to enchant these suits over a period of days, but that has been taken away now.

Most of the elite gear in the game that is actually hard to get, is actually worthless because it is never good enough to wear without enchanting first, and it is impossible to get the gear enough times in a row to enchant it properly. This is a problem. If Dulrik wants there to be gear that is extremely difficult to get, but appropriately l33t, he needs to get rid of the maximum-of-5-innate-enchantments rule.

In SK, unlike purely PVE games, the risk can come to you whether you look for it or not. Steepening any curve carries with it the risk of that incline being perceived as a wall; I could go on to talk about differentiation and latent traits, but that's probably beyond the scope of things being discussed here.

Overall, the sour taste in my mouth is that I feel like there's this "+3 gear is good enough for a player like you" doctrine quietly emerging that's not unlike the "complete at master" doctrine that I've seen zero players embrace, except it extends beyond the character to go and make quality judgments of the player behind it. I don't mean to imply that it's an invalid stance, but I do find that it is surprisingly bold given the ever-rising proportion of casuals.

I can't reckon the doctrine with any crafting system that isn't a grind stand-in (looking at you, WoW) or completely cosmetic (MUSH.)

I worry that if there isn't some sort of "difficulty slider" built into things, it might be hard to adjust them fast enough to keep pace with an evolving playerbase.

That's a fair point, I think. I'll escalate and see if anyone else has anything to say about it.



I'm sympathetic to casuals, and your argument makes sense. Let's see how things play out.

Limited equipment creates a huge challenge for balancing gear. Nightmare Temple and Iron Citadel is the only really "meaningful" content in that it's consistently challenging if you're not cheesing it with portal rings (I already miss them). Other places are more just puzzles that are easy to 3-man your way through once you know the trick - Kias, Somnium's Tower, Temple of Murder come to mind - but that knowledge travels with players, not characters, so those puzzles become pretty trivial over time and are therefore poor places to focus efforts for rewarding hard team play.

Still, for the "meaningful" content --- that is, content that really takes 6+ people working together reasonably well to accomplish --- I strongly think you have to provide some surety of material benefit to anyone who succeeds. I think you should consider starting by adding a token drop to certain Nightmare Temple bosses and to GGI. Turning in this token in at, say, Teron's adventurer guild would result in the reward of say 5 random pieces of high level loot. I envision this gear as being desc'd plainly and having maybe +4 saves on it, randomly picking from max AC mithril/energy/adamantite and water bracelets/rings/necklaces to generate a grab bag of very strong (but generic) loot. I bet the hardcore killer-achiever types would still be able to have fun gunning for the unique pieces, but it'd at least let everyone else play in the same league if they went to the effort.

And I'd strongly suggest NOT making the token unique, or rot-death, or anything. If someone has the time and desire to get a team of 6+ to play SK for 10 hours straight farming gear tokens, hell yeah, let them. Most of it will just get blown up/junked by their enemies anyways .

Interesting idea, thanks!

So All sacred armor is going to equal in innates and difficulty to retrieve in the long run? Sacred having an equal number of runes now, they are currently unbalanced.

On a side note: What self respecting sacred set would have charisma innates on the armor?

Something I would like to see regarding the increased difficulty is that it is not gated behind a knowledge wall. The harder an area is to adventure in almost the more information to get you started on it there should be around. More detailed information on how to or what to expect can be more rare. For example, to get to ToM there are several portals all requiring a key from the plane that are found in and there is a complex mechanical door should be fairly common knowledge. Taking more people causes more issues than is solves should be less frequent. The exact location of the keys what guards them and tactics for fighting them rare.


Off topic of the thread. This thread is the kind of thing I voted for when I placed a vote saying I was looking for more transparency between players and Imms. Not this the information behind the code curtain.
I think it is more DM to players terms in D&D. I can give a list of items to the DM but I dont know if Im going to get one, none or all of them. When the DM has an idea for RP he throws it out saying Im looking at this kind of thing, giving the bounds of what is planned. A few things like this also comments on when you have "finished" working on areas. I also think that the level of information passed to players should increase based on the forums such is posted, so cabal/tribunal/religion forums more information regarding things related to them. Leader forums even more details. It also helps stop situations like the newbi school changes where things get a backlash after Imms have invested a lot of time in the project and get a negative response from the work they have done.

Roughly.

I like this thread. Very constructive and I enjoy reading it.

Portal rings: why we're try taken out? Are they too OP in and of themselves? Or was it because they were hoarded, allowing one person to use them in an OP fashion?
I think putting them in the same place as the scry ball, and making them rot upon logout would solve the second of the two possible issues.

Sacred armor: I think they would be just fine if they were a little more acceptable to enchants/consecration. But that's just my initial thoughts.

Armor reboot: I think this is great and that you're doing it right. Will top teir players be the only ones to get the armor? Thus making them stronger in a pvp they already excell in? Sure. But high risk high reward. I think it's just fine that they would be stronger than mid-level players.

Pve tokens: I like the concept, but maybe not the rewards mentioned. Maybe a 'guarenteed landing of a consecration/enchant. Spend 10 of them and you'll be able to have a leet piece of gear. Idk. Again, initial thoughts but I think that tougher PVE should be rewarded with more than just the few pieces of loot that only a couple people can obtain. (See GGI and hellions.)

Thanks, Trosis.

The portal rings were not taken out, just made a lot harder to use for many players. Yes, they were too OP, and yes, they granted an "easy" button to whomever happened to be able to hang on to them. The gnome-only thing was a nod to Zavi, because we like Zavi. But I have noticed a bunch of new gnomes rolling lately. Coincidence?

We've already brought up the mechanics issues related to enchanting uber gear with D. It's not really a building issue. We'll see what, if anything, he has to say about it.