RainRain

+1. Totally reccomend joining if you want to learn the ins/outs of pvping or being on the pvp server- posteh is one of the coolest dudes on defiance and the rest of the crew is at least 95% as cool too

One of the slowest skills, but one of the most important in pvp servers. It's fine.

100% agree they messed up and dropped the ball also; and yes trust me i'm not any happy about the fact the only real information i could get was by poking at them until they gave a real response (and even then, seemingly danced around the 'did people actually abuse the exploit or not' question until now) What I more mean by the community's reaction being dumb is not people being genuinely confused- but people being convinced that there are bad actors and demanding for skill rollbacks, bans, and all the more without actually understanding the lengths that the bug was abused (aka not to any significant or noticeable factor in this regard), while also not considering that the non-exploit use of the method (that is, using alts to fuel a priest to spam spells for skills) has been long accepted and that its not a small investment to purchase and upkeep those accounts. They really needed to decide on this before releasing a new server- they didn't, and because of that they found themselves in a lose-lose situation. I can't say that justifies this entire thing going down the way it did, but I at least understand why it did go down this way and why some of the decisions were difficult to make. What I'm more interested in is what will be done about it now, of which the answer seems to be trying to make grinding it a bit less painful by making sacrificing more enticing. Which honestly, is alright with me- if they can pull that off right anyways 😆 If I have one thing to say to the staff, it's to step up your communication game. Hidden exploit fixes (like the dye thing), knee-jerk balance decisions without discussion, and keeping silent in the face of outrage isn't working out. Retrograde's post on this topic should have happened much earlier- and I will say I very much appreciate the discussion thread on sacrificing changes and the fact that more interaction is being had with the community (even though I can very clearly see why you'd want to avoid that sometimes lmao)- but even with all that said, there's a long, long way to go if you want to make sure that this steam release isn't going to end up like the other servers. Huge problem with this game's ability to retain players is simply the lack of information on things, and part of that includes the lack of transparency between the staff and community. But I got hope anyways, even if I probably shouldn't.

It doesn't give CCFP, but it freezes it- allowing people who follow libila to stay on 100% ccfp's without eating. PvE libila followers can absorb dead unbutchered bodies for the same healing as mycelium, so I don't see why it needs to be on freedom anyways, other than aesthetics I guess.

tbf its not like we have kings to use the titles with though im wondering if they're going to nerf those too once they realize how good they are for grinding

Except it literally isn't 'clear', and the people you're whining about may very well people who grinded using linking by default. You have zero evidence beyond the fact that you feel like these people exploited. The gm's checked, compared channeling skills, and watched people grind the skill actively while investigating the bug and determined that there's not enough evidence to conclude it was abused (as seen in retro's post), and that there were no huge outliers in channel skill to hint that it was abused in such a way. It's still allowed, yes; they just nerfed the hell out of it. Only favor above 20 is used up from batteries, and any links past the first 2 apply a scaling % penalty to channeling skillgain- basically, nerfing the exact thing they disliked which was using a horde of batteries to spam grind channeling. Channling with the maximum allowed number of links was still more than enough to grind the skill crazily high (4 links at 30 skill, for example). Again, the exploit was not actually the issue- the issue was that the method of grinding was deemed too efficient (many links to spam spells- even abiding by the regular limit). But yes, it's absolutely on them for not having changed this BEFORE the new server was up, but that's likely since it's something that never came up in the talks about grinding the skill and something they hadn't considered until they realized how people were grinding the skill. Definitely agree the situation has been handled poorly, but also the community reaction has been absolutely dumb (just look at this thread lol; people screaming about exploiters when the reality is that barely anyone exploited). I hate the fact that I'm the one doing more clarification than even retro here- and I only managed to do that because i poked the devs on discord and managed to figure out why they were doing things in a particular way. Getting answers for stuff like this is like pulling teeth sometimes.

+1 RoD automagically infects all nearby trees in influence, killing their harvests. Mycelium spreads from nearby tiles but can also manifest anywhere withing influence of the kingdom+faith (and if it wasn't bugged rn to be extremely slow, would be a massive pain in the ass to manage) Makes orchards more or less necessary and even then you'll have to manage it manually whenever myc pops up. Feels weird to have to battle with your own influence to harvest some fruits and such.

Because the method to grind channeling was extremely effective and they wanted to get the change in before too many people used it, simply put. Most vets know of the method, they understood it was the way to grind channeling since it had been for years- it wasn't under the radar until the devs were investigating an exploit tied to the method (that you could go above the maximum amount of links).

The change was made because the devs decided they did not like the fact that the best and most optimal way to grind channeling was creating several alt accounts and spamming spells that way. The problem is that people definitely still benefited from that method, even if it was not an exploit, and there was no change made to make non-linking grinding much easier. But that change is in progress, as seen with the feedback thread they put up.

Basically every major biome in southern defiance is completely empty- yet the northern coast has a tile density of 1-2 creatures per tile. Please save us from starvation, revert the change.

please give my body and soul affinities a use +1

deserts are barren, steppes are barren please bring me back the lovely spawns from before this patch, i desire nothing more than fresh weaponskill gain or at least put it back on defiance

Sermons are not giving our libila priest alignment in Defiance either.

I think it's difficult to understand properly how well this works without having numbers- I doubt this would in any way make sacrificing any worse in any way, although fine-tuning it is essential to making it work out. I think two other ways of going about it could work too: 1. Your 'pending' favor is just an overflow favor bar- you can sacrifice past your favor limit, but only while close to an altar. This has a hard limit on how much you can have, and this favor rapidly deteriorates the further you get from an altar. 2. The 'storage' altar suggestion works fine too- sacrificing items would store it into the altar, and casting spells would drain from the altar. I don't think making sacrificing faster would fix much, as chaining together spells would still be annoying unless you have precisely counted out bags of favor to sac in between spellcasts- that said, I also think the system just sounds more complex than it is. It's changing sacrificing from being bulk to being a slow drip over time- though how good this will work entirely depends on how much of your pool you gain each tick, how much you 'lose' if you're at maximum favor, and so forth. Having hard numbers would help judge this more appropriately; I also think just being relaxed with the 'wasted' favor if your favor bar is full (i.e only losing a very small amount each favor tick) would help concerns too. Or just make it unlimited and have it rapidly decay if you move away from an altar/haven't cast a spell recently.

It's super similar to the idea I was floating around and suggesting, and as thus I obviously support- it would make sacrificing much more appealing as a method of grinding (and just in general more appealing). Definitely +1 to Oblivion's points of allowing it to work with sacrificing monsters, and that pending favor only manifests after your current favor bar is full though. I do think that the rate of favor drain should increase if you're outside of an altar's influence though- it shouldn't be something people can use in pvp.

Old HoTA was fun, despite it's issues, and I don't think the modern HoTA really fills in the gap the old one had- there's no unified, decided "time" for when all the kingdoms should head together to a big pit to duke it out and earn glory for their kingdoms. That said, the modern HoTA is still interesting and provides some intermittent pvp. Harking back to something almost Challenge-like, a new proposed "HoTA" system (or an additional one, rather, that can coexist with the current one and just be more sparse). Similar to the last HoTA, this is an event that happens once every few days, or once a week (or longer). Rather than being a location on the map, however- portals would appear at every starter deed (or just a portal you can make like the PvP one who cares) that leads to a new, temporary, and extremely small server. Once you enter the portal, you cannot leave until the HoTA ends. This temporary server should be a different, randomized map each HoTA; obviously, with PVP permitted, with extremely high aggressive animal spawn rates. It should only remain for a short period of time (4-6 hours) before kicking players off of it. Building structures, mining and similar should not be possible on this server, but there should be a number of battlecamps dotting the server. The goal is the same as the regular HoTA: Capture a majority of the camps (4/6, for example) within the timeframe- the winning alliance will have a HoTA statue spawned at their capitol, and rewards in it. Once the HoTA is won, there should only be a limited amount of time before everyone is kicked off the server and sent home - any items remaining on this land would be lost to the abyss. Due to this, artifacts and other unique items shouldn't be able to be brought inside. Animals can be brought in, though they can only be brought out if led at the time the server closes down. Alternatively, no animals can be brought in- but there could be some to be found on the island to take around. Could also just re-use the jackal stuff too and save effort TL;DR: Old HoTA, but create a temporary, randomized server that people teleport to and fight inside (and can't build in) instead of having it at a certain spot on the map.

+1 and also color coded death tabs honestly a contender mechanic alone would fix the king issues (assuming the pick rate is made higher); though i think you should only be able to 'contend' for a king within the first week of a new king being selected by the cobra - to make sure you can't just juggle the king around after it's been decided the first time around

The last changes were noticeable within the same day of the change - mobs die off fairly quickly, at least in Defiance.

If it's still being considered, there should definitely be some changes to how channel skilling works. As-is, the people who got their fill before the nerf managed to grind their channeling very high and very quickly- and channeling is still definitely too difficult to grind. 2 links alleviates this, but it's going to be extremely noticeable for people who don't have any links at all. Adding more spells to help with channeling, or having a way to make easier spells have artificially increased difficulty (i.e converting the heavy armor penalty into a direct difficulty increase) would help. Alternatively, making sacrificing far less of a pain.

The raid windows and starter islands prevent that exact thing- you're very unlikely to just die at any random moment and your place is unlikely to be bashed down suddenly (doubly so in the starter island, which is much harder to raid, has a much tighter raid window and has far less incentive to raid). It's very clear you want some sort of pvp experience, but that just doesn't work in the PvE servers (you can't have partial thievery without full pvp; it won't work out in the end)- and it's certainly not something anyone is going to want nor something you should expect to be added. But it also seems you have misconceptions about how the pvp servers actually end up working in play- so i encourage you to go out, ask questions and dip your toes in there if that's the sort of thing you want.

just play on a pvp server my dude

+1 no taxation without representation

I was floating this idea; it'd basically make "backup" horses much less useful in combat and make combat much riskier, but i'm not entirely sure if that's a world ending change. Definitely something that should be discussed before being implemented though. Best suggestion to nerf this specifically without nerfing other things is to just make it so you still need to lead a pet to mount it.

There exists a type of wild, player-controlled creature in this game who despite waiting 20 seconds for their compass to reset, well never know the direction of north. Other similar, though far less deadly beasts, immediately become disoriented once they enter a forest and are whacked in the eyes by endless leaves. And worst of all- there are creatures that speak, and despite the many words they spew from their mouths, can never manage to give accurate information. But all creatures known three places: Rifts, the White Light and the Black Light. As thus- I suggest a new NS/Alchemy-based item that can be crafted with various ingredients (Flint, sugar, cow guts and probably something else that doesn't really make any sense) and then blessed by a priest to create an item that can be activated on any tile to crate a temporary 'beacon'- lighting up a bright light similar to the BL/WL/Rift lights straight into the sky. The quality of the item should impact the distance that others creatures can see said beacon, as well as the duration that it remains for. Dyes could be used to tint the beacon in a certain color as well, for decoration.

any tips on how to handle the emotional aspect of grinding weaponsmithing