Dulrik wrote:
The most successful PKers on SK play short-lived characters who don't have the stamina to make Hero.
You can argue that hero is not the right word for this position, but I'm going to keep using it. It emphasizes what we want to see in characters on SK. And yes, PK does contribute or hinder your score.
I won't claim the algorithm is perfect. Nothing ever is. But we'll be continuously augmenting it's short comings as they are revealed.
Some of us keep going. And then we go another round. I did play a mercenary for over 3 years.
Moreover the helpfiles are intentionally misleading as it leads players to believe that being deficient in one area they can still manage to be flagged as a hero. This is, of course, untrue as a deficiency in at least one area will make you ineligible.
Which brings me to my next point. The reward system is utterly useless. Paragons only reward people within their inner circle. When Achernar told me that most paragons resides at about 25-35 points back when I had Destrivai and that Frollith and Destrivai had 77 and somewhere around 120 points it was pretty evident that other paragons simply don't bother rewarding people. Considering the time investment put into roleplaying versus mindlessly slaying NPCs for xp the latter being far more efficient for gaining levels, roleplaying is hardly worth the time put into it. Especially since a character can only be rewarded once per day (no idea why this limitation is even set, good roleplay is good roleplay and should be able to be rewarded multiple times if necessary especially since the inverse is true that you can be penalized multiple times a day).
The rules are also far too oppressive. Yes, there need to be rules, but there is that ever persistent bizarre juxtaposition of ultra-violence in Shattered Kingdoms versus the qualms of what words people are using. If Shattered Kingdoms was a video game rated by the ESRB it'd easily receive an M rating for the violent content alone. That players should tiptoe about their use of language is absurd. Players don't want to return to playing the game for fear of violating new rules that seem to pop out of the woodwork for silly reasons.