Gavaldor

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  1. Did you even read my original message quotes or my response above yours? That was exactly my complaint, the new states are not balanced well, the new "top heat" state is much too short No you can't anymore, the new heat states are all within the first line of the fuel state, so they are not granular enough. If you had read my posts, I already mentioned that. So given that this has been marked as "working as intended" what about making new lines for the fuel state? You did new lines for the heat state, so why can't the fuel state be matching the new granularity for consistency?
  2. To people saying "1.5 hours no refuel" and "4 hours no refuel" - is that the maximum heat of white-hot? I'm aware that I can still forge after it cools down to lesser heat, my complaint was that the maximum heat, after the patch, just remains for a very short timing. This is notably different from the old design, where a fueled forge remains maximum heat (as far as its observable) for a much longer time. It was clearly visible from the fuel state messages when it would go below maximum heat. With the new heat states I can no longer note from the fuel states that it will start cooling down. So yes, its not a functional thing of not being able to use the forge after 20 min when white-hot is gone, but I have to ask: - what is the point of introducing white-hot if you don't want to give it any functionality? - if you want to give it functionality eventually, running white-hot for just 20 minutes on good equipment seems too short to me - the visual heat state change alone (toggling between white and blue) is very irritating Finally, as stated in the original post, the fuel state messages are no longer sufficient if this is the intended behvaior and supposed to remain this short for the white-hot state. The fuel messages were designed for the old heat states. I want to know before it runs out that I have to refuel, to avoid the irritating visual state changes (and if eventually any functionality is associated with it, to retain that functionality).
  3. Supreme forge 80ql only stays "white hot" for 20 minutes after the latest patch, even though the fueling line doesn't say anything different and indicates its still fuelled. Before the patch the forge would last for hours before it needed refueling. Refuelling every 20 minutes on high quality equipment sounds tedious, hope this is a bug and not intended. Also, if its intended and will not be fixed, then at least the status message for the fuel indicator should be more detailed as well, because its relaly hard to properly refuel now.
  4. Whats the balancing idea here? To me it sounds like it just allows the dominant group of players to increase their kingdoms influence with less work? This mechanic seems to do nothing to help balance the power, it just reinforces the imbalance? As far as I can tell the only thing preventing a "one-kingdom-only" situation is that people are getting bored of recapturing and/or reacting to tower captures. May happen, but if balancing relies on the game being boring thats not great game design.
  5. The discussion resulted due to the original post asked for feedback about punishments for people remaining on starter. I doubt they can integrate any such changes into the next patch anyways, way to little time. I had an interesting ingame discussion which ended in the suggestion to use items for rebalancing. If skills (and time spent playing) aren't the dealmaker for winning or losing a fight, but coming prepared with the right kind of items and equipment or enchantment (i.e. not just high ql) then its easy to have people catch up on starter and proceed to mainland. Like, you could even repurpose the useless elemental enchants instead of coming up with new item mechanics. Make new "X beats Y beats Z beats X" chains, and make it possible, with proper preparation, to win over someone having spent two years training. Currently thats only possible by tricking them into making a mistake, which usually is a one-time strategy so not viable. Its a problem of people wanting "time/effort spent in game" mean to "win the fights" or "make the game easier" which is very common in single-player games but cannot work in persistent games which continually wants to introduce new people. The current system is a self-reinforcing system that keeps (slightly) improving the already good veteran players and makes it impossible for new players to catch up because they are constantly punished and losing. if you mean MR, people are no longer fighting JK because we can predict the outcome. There is no point in repeating the same thing over and over, spending our time entertaining you, not us. So we just do what entertains us. I've explained before, the power gap prevents people from catching up and be competitive to you, so they simply won't play with you. Just to say, JK players haven't been any different in situations where there wasn't this power gap, when they can predict they are outnumbered and might lose they either run or call for reinforcement. Its a natural thing to do, not blaming anyone here, if you can predict the outcome then theres no need to fight if you know you're going to be on the losing side. Of course there are always some players that enjoy the fight more and know they have enough resources or don't care if they lose. Demanding that playstyle from everyone just leads to isolating yourself though, because most people don't play that way.
  6. So just to throw in some ideas, so people don't complain about me not giving any suggestions in a threading asking for suggestions ... (not saying any of these suggestions are what should be done, they are just starting points to think about) The idea of starter islands was to be the place where people can catch up with the established players. Thats what MR is using it for, currently, except the games mechanics isn't giving them any chance to actually ever catch up enough to be competitive and move off starter naturally. If you don't want to devalue existing veterans achievements too much, you can just reinforce that original idea and massively boost start island capabilities to catch up and get peoples skills and equip on competitive levels. This probably will still require fine tuning the combat formulas since at high skills its massively unbalanced and easily tips off. Anyways, most people will probably move off starter islands naturally when they feel they are capable of playing pvp somewhat successfully, there are already incentives to be off starter (depots, hota, bigger deeds ...) and can add more. To be able to "catch up" one option would be giving people playing on starter island/kingdom skill gain bonus (like the epic skill curves) to catch up to veterans, or whatever else you can imagine, maybe something more object-based (like holy sites) on starter giving out buffs, whatever. Of course that will still be dissatisfying to veteran players if people actually can catch up to them without spending as much affort, and possibly even drive them back to starter in desire of taking advantage of these mechanics. So this is just a start for thoughts and not something ready to implement. But its either boosting new players or nerfing veterans, or a combination of both. The only other option is starting an entirely new server with fixed endgame mechanics and leave defiance as museum for those who want to value their achievements over having a functioning pvp server. If boosting new players doesn't feel like a good approach, another approach would be to block pvp where the power gap is too large, by removing incentives to pvp in these cases. This requires quantifying the power gap in code and disabling any rewards/punishments if a power gap is detected in players involved in the fight (i.e. those appearing on death list). Remove item and affinity loss (punishment) and affinity and statistic gain (reward) in these cases. Still, this pvp blocking will not be sufficient to actually ever catch up to some of the veterans, so it effectively would exclude them from pvp, and its probably very hard to get the code judging the power gap right, so definitely needs more thought if going in this direction. Also doesn't really feel in the spirit of wurm to me, just wanted to bring an example of there being more than one way to the same goal. So yeah, I'm fine with all of this being ignored, its just suggestions where to start thinking for people who have no clue at all, because the things being discussed before are not suitable to fix the problem. My main point remains that the problem is new players are victimized and the core game mechanics make it impossible for them to be successful in pvp against veterans. You should be fixing these problems, not just make the game more enjoyable for the veterans, because if you don't, no new people will be coming and the server will die the same slow death as the old servers. (I also remind you that I count myself as veteran, so depending on which route the fixes will take, if they ever are made, I expect to either be boosted to be competitive in pvp, or be penalized along with the other veterans. Its really up to the devs and personally I don't care as I don't value my own time and achievements over having a functioning community. Defiance without a healthy player flow is a dead server to me, as my main motivation is not just bashing heads in pvp with the same old veterans over and over again, as a lot of people want things to be. If thats not the game devs want it to be, thats their thing to decide, I just wanted to point out it doesn't have to be.)
  7. Hint: The tone in which you read my previous and this post is your own choice, not mine to make. Its impossible to formulate posts here in a way that everyone understands or is pleased with. Those who want to take offense in it will. The whole point of my posts are to give the devs a hint about what they are doing wrong, I do not really care about the players opinion, because its not theirs to fix. If players want to try to influence the devs to not fix the problem, sure, let the game die and stagnate like the old servers. It means rebalancing the game, not "fix" individual characters. I always am careful with my choice of words, if you want to read something into them to be offended I can't help you. Yes, people who are currently massively overpowered would be less powerful in regards to other people. That would include me, I'm a veteran as well, just trained in different areas than you. The whole point of my post is pointing out a the fact that should be obvious but everyone is looking away from: that the game (i.e. not talking about people, even though I could say something about those at well) is toxic towards new players as far as pvp servers are concerned. The people who put in the work and time to get where they are today made a huge mistake, they killed the game because they rushed so far ahead from other people that a power imbalance manifested, and the fact that this happens is a major flaw in the game mechanics and game balance. Fixing it obviously involves reducing the power gap which always will feel "punishing" to those players, because it devalues their efforts they have put in. The only other alternative is turning the game into a museum like the old servers. Thats what will happen naturally. Any band aid applied as discussed in this thread will just revive the game a short time and then leave it off worse because more people left. That new players get victimized, to feed the veterans desire for gameplay, and leave. Thats the gameplay mechanic of the pvp servers once the power imbalance has been established after a new server started. At this point you can only escape it by having detailed knowledge about how to not play the game. And you can never successfully pvp when following that strategy, because its (realistically) impossible to "catch up" with the veterans. You have to go out of your way and hide from veterans too far ahead of you in the gameplay curve, and actively seek out either people in your area of the gameplay curve, or weaker people to abuse. Make the game more attractive to new players, not only in pve, but also on pvp servers. That involves rebalancing the game so that new players can be successful too, including in pvp. I don't want to tell the devs how exactly to rebalance, its their choice to imagine how the game should work, but apparently someone needs to point them at the obvious issue because they don't have any monitoring in place to know about player flow, nor have anyone playing the pvp server unbiased enough to notice the problem? If the game cannot get new players to have an enjoyable and successful experience, its a dead game. Its exactly the same non-solution as driving people off starter. Its a short term bandaid to bring in a few "old new" players to revive the gameplay experience of the veterans. It has the advantage over driving people off starter, that it will draw in more veterans who possibly are similarly unbalanced than existing veterans, so it would mix up the power imbalance, but not fix it. It does nothing to enable new players to be successful.
  8. I'm very disappointed the devs don't understand anything about maintaining a pvp server or community. The suggestions made here, to drive people off starter, are about victimizing them to give a small group of veterans more pvp gameplay. Thats not how to grow a healthy pvp community. There already are penalties for starter deeds, most people wouldn't be on starter if there wasn't this massive power imbalance. The starter protection is used to offset the existing power imbalance. Just look back at the first year when all kingdoms were having plenty deeds off starter, before the power imbalance started driving people off and back onto starter. If you want a continuously working pvp server you have to rebalance and break the power imbalance, not reenforce it. You have to make it possible for new people that are coming to the server actually making kills. The way its currently balanced just is channeling ever more power to a small group of veterans. Newcomers die a few times and go away. Its a toxic system, the result is a dead server.
  9. I just heared that PMKs will probably be forced enemies (i.e. each PMK is considered an enemy to each other) so you literally can't play anymore with people who happen to have their deed made on starter and can't join your PMK? Or if the tower limit is enforced, can't play with people living further away than the tower limit allows? Forced further fracturing of the community basically? Is this enforced by the "no simultanous logins to enemy kingdom" rule? So can't even login with an alt to chat with friends living on starter? I understand the desire to prevent people doing a one-PMK-per-person thing where everyone gets the bonus, but forcing people to move off-starter and either abandoning their deeds or abandoning their friends, in the particular scenario of Defiance, seems to be a bad move too. It feels like this needs a lot more thought put into it, especially how the community interactions work, not just the pvp interactions. Also, keeping starter kingdoms, wouldn't this just effect to granting one faction a "free PMK" by being the faction who owns the starter kingdom? I feel this whole discussion thread seems to be a bad idea, asking people about whether they are ok with PMKs without them being aware of all the details that would entail.
  10. Just for the record I'm not against PMKs in general, and I talked to the deed owners I'm playing on, they aren't against it either. Of course we don't have any idea of what exactly this means from this vague discussion where everyone seems to have suggestions of their own how exactly it should look like. I'd appreciate it being properly thought through and not rushing it just to duct tape some social issues in the JK faction. But thats just my personal opinion, no general opposition. Hope this helps.
  11. Thats going to be tough to achieve, I've been playing Defiance MR on an off-starter deed owned by mostly non-english speaking people, who are only occasionally online. If you are doing a reset I'd expect a solid plan from your side how to not make those people not lose all they've worked for in the last years. Definitely more than "know everyone was ok with it" because you don't even have infrastructure in place to formally ask them, I believe? Also, forcing off-deed owners to convert into a PMK I heared did cost ingame money seems another questionable thing to do. Make people pay again just to keep playing??? Maybe give people who have off starter deeds an automatic conversion into PMKs so its not vulnerable and destroying all their work? I personally have no idea how these mechanics work, so I can't even pass the deed owners advice over what will happen and how they have to plan for it, so the idea to just reset the maps towers and hope people are ok with it based on some vague forum discussion seems really stupid to me, sorry.
  12. The suggestions here sound really awkward - Reset of towers outside starter: how is this supposed to work with deeds currently off starter? Forced to make a PMK? Forced to disband? - Limitation of towers suggestion ... sounds awkward because it fractures the player base even more. Now every group of deeds would be forced to be its own PMK due to distance preventing joining a PMK too far away? The second point wouldn't be so bad on a fresh start, but on a map already populated with deeds, even if its just a handful, it seems awkward and unfair to the people having invested into those deeds to now change the way the game works for them entirely.
  13. Well, sorry then for misunderstanding your previous post. I got annoyed by everyone bashing a mechanic thats inherently neutral and whining about the particular scenario. Should have read more carefully, my mistake. I've got only Defiance to experience, since Valrei was enabled it was always this way for us, so I can't say what was before like you describe. According to the patch notes there should be more (but optional) reward tables and I agree I have never ever seen them drop. Unfortunately thats nothing I can report and we always had to assume we were "just unlucky" so I just ignore it and hope sometime something drops or someone reworks it. Valrei has been broken since release for us in a few different ways and the general understanding was that nobody dares to touch that code anymore. So as far as this topic is concerned, I still think its a valid design decision and either way is "ok", instant win or letting the one on the tile fight it out, as its a neutral mechanic. I don't think there's a bug as far as this case is concerned. As mentioned before I agree that other things need fixing or rebalancing.
  14. [edit] initially misread above post, so editing that now for future readers, sorry - the general wording remains but I changed the adressing > You used to win as soon as you hit your home with enough items, didnt matter whos on the tile waiting. Nope, as far as Defiance is concerned you would be making that up from biased memory, I'm literally following every scenario and the last time someone was on a home tile was months ago. One time they moved off before we moved on it (by stopping doing missions to delay ourselves) so we didn't get to know what the rules were. I think another time we may actually have observed this very behavior but I forgot about it and can't find it in the logs, but the discussion feels familiar. Its very rare that the last step is on an occupied tile. I get that Lib/BL players are angry but they have only yourself to blame for being lazy and stop doing missions (or blame the RNG if it gave them a mission they couldn't solve, but we are getting those all the time in MR, so nothing to call unfair). They were way ahead, before the server restart on tuesday we were locked in a traitor mission we couldn't solve for several days even though we tried, we went through several trap tiles which doubled our walking time multiple times - I'm surprised we reached them at all. I agree with rebalancing being needed on basis of the points in the old thread linked by Omar, with proper statistical analysis to make sure its fair, and adjusting of the map to make sure everythings reachable in a fair way - but the thing happening in this thread so far seems to be mostly whining over a lost scenario (that isn't even lost yet), not productive discussion.
  15. I had wondered the same as posted here, even made a ticket ingame because I thought Valrei was stuck (Lib not updating their target after moving, could use clearer messaging!). CM responded this is intended behavior, after consulting devs, basically same as Darklord said above - Libilia was waiting for the tile to become clear before winning the game - which is fair I guess, gives more options to intervene besides running after the god. As far as this mechanic is concerned, I think its fair to call it a design decision, it doesn't favor anyone, anyone can be in either position of the mechanic. As far as the current scenario is concerned (and I'm playing for Mag, just for the record) I'd have preferred Libilia win instantly and start fresh, because now we are going home with Mag, and Fo is likely camping our home, and Lib may catch up and kill Mag before. Lots of risk, plenty of opportunities to lose, long way ahead, draws out the scenario unnecessary for my taste, but that doesn't make the mechanic unfair. As far as Magranon being "slightly stronger" is concerned ... yes it feels like he is, but its still a dice roll at the end of the day, we could just as well have lost - this has happened before enough times already, playing Mag's side doesn't make it a guaranteed success. In fact, most of the times we are just winning scenarios because enemy kingdoms don't take Valrei as serious as we do and aren't working on their missions when they should. In fact, Lib could have reached her home tile before us reaching it and getting the instant win, had BL put more effort into Valrei. If devs are going to touch the balancing I'd suggest they make themselve a tool to simulate lots and lots of combat to see how balanced it _really_ is. People are biased, including myself, and always recognize failure higher than success - thats just how people work - without statistics you are not going to see the truth, and statistics need large numbers, so this isn't doable by players (unless someone extracts the code from WU and builds a simulator and tries to figure out how to balance better). If they are doing a rebalance I request the devs doing their homework so they have confidence in their change, and not do it solely on player suggestions, because any such suggestion will inherently be biased to themselves. > this has not been the case before. We have won soon as we touch our home, same for them. Has there been a ninja patch? It has been the case before I think, after having this whole discussion it started feeling familiar. Unfortunately its not easy to find any logs about it since there are no keywords to search for. Anyways, having the home tile camped is a very rare edge case so it doesn't happen often. Instant wins are normal, yes, but usually the tile is empty. Without evidence to back it up I'd say this has always worked this way, the explanation seems reasonable. Anyone who has technical knowledge is free to check the code of WU by the way - (it is not encrypted/obfuscated and free to download without having to buy the game, explained on the wiki how to do it, of course you need to know how to unpack it and read it so you do need technical knowledge) > Yeah this does seem a bit off. Is there a better explanation for or some more ideas how this happened? IMHO the explanation is perfectly reasonable. What do you think is bad? > Even if they were fairly balanced a god can snowball if they are stronger and can do this. Stronger = can camp enemy home tiles = more mission doing players join the stronger side = stronger. Camping is not reliable. Combat rolls aren't either. When you camp you spend about the same time off-home as on-home unless you intentionally avoid doing missions vs. spamming missions, and then there will always be that one bad mission that ruins your tactic. > Stronger = can camp enemy home tiles = more mission doing players join the stronger side = stronger I have not seen one single player join MR because of Valrei. Most people, coming from pve, don't even know what Valrei is. MR is just as underpopulated as Defiance is. Its a dead server with a handful of people playing niche games, each kingdom filling different niches. We are passionate about Valrei, not because MR is stronger, but because its a nice metagame and gives purpose where most other activity are currently terribly unbalanced and mostly unplayable. > Mag can win every scenario, just direct Mag to the home tile of anyone that will collect the tokens first, easy. You apparently didn't even follow the last scenarios, which JK won several of without us being able to reach them in time. The main reason why MR wins most Valrei scenarios is that other kingdoms just don't do much. JK became active on Valrei recently for a while and quickly won those 2 or 3 scenarios with nothing we could do (I think in one of them we reached them but lost the combat roll). The most important aspect is the initial roll of chests, there were several scenarios in the past where Lib could have had a quick win but nobody bothered. TLDR: I agree that valrei could be balanced better, the thread linked by Omar has lots of valid points, but I don't like the way this particular thread of discussion is going, because its neither productive nor looking for fair balancing