Graymane

-1. Absolutely hate winter. Please remove from game.

Don't allow f2p alts on chaos. I believe any prem toons should be allowed and drop tabs, affinities and fight skills on chaos the same as if they are 20 fs. The biggest pain in removing f2p is going to be deed owners since so many are f2p.

+1 to ban F2P alts. I'm ok with prem alts. I'm not sure giving them all 20 FS and not allowing to drop under is a good idea. Doesn't that make my road from 70 FS to 99 much easier? Oh wait...maybe I should be pro 20 FS alts...

As much as this pains me...+1

I've not played on Epic, so can't comment on their side of things. I have played on Chaos for about 4 months though as a new player. I've been a freedom "hermit", I've been in the smallest PMK on the server (Ebonaura) and the largest (MR). What I love about Chaos is first and foremost, the people are helpful and great. This is really "gang" warfare and your gang always has your back. Yes, there can be exceptions, but for the most part, people there are great. Even though the groups I've been in love to hate Hashi's HOTS crew and JK, I bet they feel the same way about their community. I like the fact that Chaos is more KvK. If you come there with only a straight out PvP mindset, you and your kingdom will not last very long. It is a place where you can truly win some pvp battles but lose the war. I guess I'm in the minority, but I like raiding and being raided. When I was with Ebo, the different deeds I was on got raided almost daily or at least people would show up in local to pvp. I take those events as opportunities to learn how to play better, hide better, build better, whatever. Being on the attacking end also has it charms in that I get to see a lot of places, a lot of different ways to build deeds, how to attack, how to defend, etc. But the thing I like most about raiding or being raided is the teamwork. You see people working together on both sides to accomplish something or prevent something. This extends to helping equip yourselves as well. Your kingdom will help you get geared up for pvp but also for your tradeskills. The downside from my perspective is that new players really cannot contribute to the pvp activity itself in any meaningful fashion. You can certainly contribute to kvk raiding and defending, but in pvp, we just die too fast and that can lead to a chain reaction in a numbers pvp game. I'm not really advocating change or anything here, just stating the reality of the situation. Chaos is more a way of life rather than just thinking you are going sail over and do some pvp for the weekend. You have to build your character and pay your dues here. Mistakes are rewarded with a quick death here. For freedomers though, Chaos is a good community environment with much less of the drama I see on Freedom where you can't actually do anything about it. If you've been playing for a long time, you probably already have a lot of good stats that will help with PvP. 70 longsword, 70 shield, 70 fighting, huge axe, digging, mining, high body strength are what you should aim for. You can get to 70/70/70 very quickly on freedom, so spend a week or two and get those skills up, then join one of the PMKs and see what it is like.

I think if you have to ask how to have fun in a game, maybe it isnt for you

Gosh, if only we could have a separate epic poll from chaos poll and maybe leave it on chaos and remove it from epic if that was what everyone wanted. I mean, if only it were possible to have different features on the different clusters.

Hence why so many don't want to change things for the sake of changing things. There are way to many variables and situations that haven't been accounted for. "SOTG" needs its own thread and discussion.

+1!

Hidden was a poor choice of words. What I mean is there is no comprehensive roadmap of what is being proposed that we can take into consideration.

See Retro? This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. It is like you are keeping 90% of proposed changes hidden. How can we comment on changes when you are keeping so much hidden (I'm talking about the last sentence btw)? Removal of archery penalties will certainly help some non-SOTG players participate more, especially defensively. I am only going to speak from a Chaos perspective. I think though, that it hasn't really been thought out how combat actually proceeds. Lets say you remove SOTG or nerf it or whatever. You think people with huge axes are now more vulnerable and now everyone is going to carry sword and board. Lets say you are correct for the sake of argument. What I think will actually happen is that champs and the king will now push to the front (yah, they do now as well, but there are also SOTG players right there with them). They will keep their huge axes cause the SOTG nerf is meaningless to them. They will then proceed to chop down all the non-titled, non-champ, nerted SOTG players in seconds and take no damage since those players are using sword and board. You aren't going to get away or back out of combat in plate cause you are webbed and can't move. You have no defense at all because now you don't have SOTG either. My problem is that your proposed changes are going to make players die even faster than they do now. That is bad! They die fast enough already! Players needs more defensive options, not fewer, nerfed ones. How does your scenario promote more pvp? Kingdoms will now have to wait for their champs and king to get online to pvp. This isn't going to make everyone leave their deed and start pvping over night.

While I think a lot of the suggestions both for SOTG and the other pvp changes are well intentioned, they just seem like a smorgasborg of a bit of this and a bit of that. There doesn't seem to be a unified, driving vision from the dev team of what pvp is and what it should be. Just a bunch of players with relatively random suggestions. I'm asking myself now for each and every suggestion "does this make people want to pvp more?" and also "does this make pvp better?". It is, of course, my own point of view and many are going to have a different point of view and that is a big part of the problem: No vision from the "top". For SOTG, I really just don't get it. What does reducing it matter for pvp? It won't make other paths better in pvp, they will still be relatively useless. It won't make combat last longer or be more interesting. It is going to make it shorter. It won't make new players more viable in pvp. It will make established players even more powerful. It won't balance combat mechanics as 2 handers are already overpowered and this just makes it more so. By itself, it literally makes the game worse. So I keep going back to what is the point of these suggestions and these threads without some kind of unifying vision? Everyone needs to really think about the suggestions made so far in this thread and the other. How many of these suggestions are really core to making pvp a better experience? How many are really going to make someone that doesn't play this game any more come back? Are these changes really going to make someone try the game that hasn't before? Things like a valrei mobs stunning and throwing. Is that issue really deserving of being part of a major pvp rebalance? It just seems very trivial compared to other changes like SOTG changes. I count 15 proposed changes in the new list. Some are no brainers like archery key binds. Some are specific to Epic. How many are really core to the pvp experience? Shouldn't we be spending our time debating those? I really think you need to split off the SOTG question (and related other path balancing) to its own thread and debate. I feel like there is a rush to get something done just to be seen to be doing something or to satisfy a vocal minority (maybe a majority, i don't know really). Changes to mount mechanics, tower capping and pvp mechanics like SOTG seem really easy to test on the test server if players are given enough incentive. Chaos and Epic seem like very different environments. What works for one won't necessarily work for the other or be as effective on the other. Are we really sure the changes we are making HAVE to be global across both?

+1 to DR changes to other paths as well as scaled DR along the way.

Retro, please consider locking this post and creating a new one with your changed wording

best thread...ever?

Same when I started with Ebonaura and the same with MR. I've never been told "no", I can't participate in pvp by anyone. It is encouraged. Now, you have to be smart enough to know that if you are in the front, in plate, get targeted and webbed, you are gonna die, but oh well, play smarter. The only time I question it myself is 5 people in a sailboat. If you are the weak link, you get your whole team killed. "Get Good" doesn't just mean SOTG, it means get better fighting skills all around and learn the game.

It seems that the dev team can't figure out a way to make all different armors viable. Making SOTG work with cloth/leather but leave out plate/chain. So now plate smiths will be like chain smiths, relatively useless on pvp servers. Who is going to be running around in plate after this change? This just forces non-top tier pvpers into cloth/leather as well as SOTG. These proposed SOTG nerfs are just rearranging deck chairs on the titantic. pvpers cannot last when focused down by huge axes. Most normal players die in a couple of shots in a few seconds. SOTG is part of the pvp game now. Look at retro's list of changes, most do not directly address pvp itself, just the meta game around it (albeit much needed and some good suggestions mixed in with the bad ones). No mention of balancing damage, CR, damage reduction, weapon balance, armor balance, etc. Only a massive nerf to SOTG.

I am not trying to be disrepectful, but why are the skills so low for an account that old? Did you stop playing and come back or is this alt or something?

Yah, I know. What I meant was that I WISH it would say "completing the wall" because that is better behavior than just continuing it. It allows these spammy, hackish multistory buildings with just floors to continue to exist more or less forever just by doing a single continue action on it.

Would be better if it read "completing the wall will reset damage."

My concern is that there is a LOT wrong with pvp. This is simply a one-off nerf suggestion to the single skill that DOES keep you alive for more than a few shots. It is like suggesting that that if I'm failing as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest to cut my other leg off. If you want to one-off nerf something, why not pick the thing that is crazy which is huge axes killing people in a couple of shots? I am always going to -1 one-off nerf suggestions that don't account for re-balance as a whole. As a group, we should realize that the game now is not the game then. If it was so great and people were having such fun, why was the game changed so drastically? It is either because the devs don't care about what we all think of it or people weren't having as much fun as nostalgia seems to say.

+1 to some random suggestions. No comment on champ suggestions. -1 pmk limit for now until i understand how things work when a pmk falls under a certain number of active players. I believe that titles are lost now. -1 deed amount cap. If players want to create deeds, let them? If you want to limit plopping them down anywhere, tie them somehow to existing kingdom influence? -1 tower capping. Not sure what the point is? Just more tedium? Rarely does anyone come to contest tower caps anyway. Maybe tied to my suggestion below it might make more sense, at least to me. Maybe a different way to limit kingdom size is to make the strength of a tower (guards and bashing) correlate to how many there are. So the fewer towers a kingdom has, the stronger each one is. Maybe also only allow new towers in the range of an existing tower and new villages in the influence of an existing tower. Islands and "dislocated" villages and towers cannot be expanded until connected to the capital grid.

+1