Bind traitor starting location to deed areas

[Roccandil 959]

Just got back from spending two hours fruitlessly zig-zagging over the map spamming a pendulum (a nice one: 98 cast). That's really boring, frustrating, enraging, etc. (On the bright side, I found some nice stuff lying around, so not a total waste.)

 

At any rate, the pendulum is great for zeroing in on a traitor when you get fairly close, but the requirement to search an entire region, is, in my opinion, too much. I really like how the tree missions work now: every time one pops, it feels like a race, which is exciting. A traitor mission, though, is just a discouraging slog.

 

If traitors spawned like Avatars near a deed within a region, however, not only does that encourage folks to get out there instead of saying, "oh, traitor mission, I'm staying on deed", but searching for traitors on Elevation suddenly gets more interesting. 

 

Sabotage and intercept become more viable options, whereas right now I don't even bother with traitors on Elevation: that's just so much map to cover.

[MrGARY 12,421]

its not really too much, pendulum makes it ridiculously easy.  tying it to a deed just makes it a joke of a mission not even fit for the name "mission"

 

also if people aren't willing to go off deed to find traitors i dont think making them spawn next to enemy deeds will encourage them any further... it will just enable the easy farming of traitors by home/ally deeds

[Sjarn 81]

+1.  I agree the pendulum has much too small a range, and the region identified in the mission is just far too large.  Avatars wanders quite far from the deeds they start at, in fact by the time I get equipped and venture out to meet them they are often not even in local for the deeds they start at... but at least it narrows down the starting point a bit.

[Tilda 651]

+1 if they were like avatars they would wander but at least we would have a starting point instead of a whole region to wander for ages with no sighting with or without a pendulum

[Roccandil 959]

9 hours ago, MrGARY said:

its not really too much, pendulum makes it ridiculously easy.  tying it to a deed just makes it a joke of a mission not even fit for the name "mission"

 

No, pendulums don't make traitor missions ridiculously easy, and you'll never convince me of that: I have too much personal, in-your-face experience spamming pendulums for hours. 

 

Tying missions to a deed is no joke: Avatars, for instance, wander a -lot-, especially on steep places (work around a mountain to get to it, only to find it's decided to cross back.... )

 

9 hours ago, MrGARY said:

 

also if people aren't willing to go off deed to find traitors i dont think making them spawn next to enemy deeds will encourage them any further... it will just enable the easy farming of traitors by home/ally deeds

 

All right: I'll spell it out: the higher the perceived difficulty/frustration of a mission, the fewer the people that will attempt it. Making traitors easier to find will get -more- people off deed.

 

Now if all deeds were populated heavily, then, sure, deed-based missions would be easy farming, but realistically, they're not. Most of the time when I'm on, deed-based missions occur when no one from those deeds is online.

 

The idea that the existing population must suffer through missions designed for 50+ pop per server or more, in hopes that maybe we'll get that 50+ pop again, is like the old saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

[JakeRivers 2,921]

I don't want those avatars any where near my deeds, they tend to bust fences and walls.

[MrGARY 12,421]

1 hour ago, Roccandil said:

No, pendulums don't make traitor missions ridiculously easy, and you'll never convince me of that: I have too much personal, in-your-face experience spamming pendulums for hours. 

Tying missions to a deed is no joke: Avatars, for instance, wander a -lot-, especially on steep places (work around a mountain to get to it, only to find it's decided to cross back.... )

All right: I'll spell it out: the higher the perceived difficulty/frustration of a mission, the fewer the people that will attempt it. Making traitors easier to find will get -more- people off deed.

Now if all deeds were populated heavily, then, sure, deed-based missions would be easy farming, but realistically, they're not. Most of the time when I'm on, deed-based missions occur when no one from those deeds is online.

The idea that the existing population must suffer through missions designed for 50+ pop per server or more, in hopes that maybe we'll get that 50+ pop again, is like the old saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

 

Avatars wandering is something new and no idea why it was added or if it was even intentional.  However... just because avatars wander does not mean all animals will, because they don't.  Unless it's a deer, which will be 17 locals away by the first time you get it on a pendulum.

Easy home/ally deed mission farming doesn't imply that only those that live there will do it, it means you know precisely where the traitor is, and unlike an avatar, all you have to do is go swing a pendulum around and you'll find your traitor within minutes, so yes it "will get more people off deed" because its easy and safe and goes against the grain of the idea that missions are pvp based.  Enemy won't camp at a deed to kill you in a normal scenario, and you aren't going to a populated enemy deed to kill a traitor.

 

I think you also need to remember that the square lurker in the dark reaches around you is also being made 4x larger with the priest update

[Roccandil 959]

30 minutes ago, MrGARY said:

Easy home/ally deed mission farming doesn't imply that only those that live there will do it, it means you know precisely where the traitor is, and unlike an avatar, all you have to do is go swing a pendulum around and you'll find your traitor within minutes, so yes it "will get more people off deed" because its easy and safe and goes against the grain of the idea that missions are pvp based. 

 

You know, I'd much rather err on the side of players actually doing missions, than having them seeing a traitor mission, and saying, "screw that."

[Figs 21]

-1 Traitors are easy enough to find with a pendulum

[Sjarn 81]

19 hours ago, Figs said:

-1 Traitors are easy enough to find with a pendulum

 

No, they're not.  I have spent days with a very high ql pendulum trying to find a tiny traitor bird of some sort .  Maybe the 4x distance will help, though it's still a pretty small area on a huge server.  And I don't think there is any reason why traitor animals can't be set to wander in the same way the avatars do today.

[Figs 21]

4 hours ago, Sjarn said:

No, they're not.  I have spent days with a very high ql pendulum trying to find a tiny traitor bird of some sort .  Maybe the 4x distance will help, though it's still a pretty small area on a huge server.  And I don't think there is any reason why traitor animals can't be set to wander in the same way the avatars do today.

 

While I admit I haven't hunted traitors on the larger servers I have found 46 of them in the last year on the 8x8km servers. I am no stranger to pendulum spamming. Sure some can take a few hours, but most were found within 30min of them spawning. Making them wander like avatars would be awful, currently traitors don't move very far from where they spawn so you really only have to search an area once. This would not be the case if they move 5 locals away in a short period of time.

[Wiolo 219]

-1 That's what the pendulum is for. That would make it even more ridiculously easy.

[Roccandil 959]

It isn't ridiculously easy, nor is it fun. Missions that cause players to say, "screw that, I'm doing something else with my time" are bad for the game (especially on Epic).