The Solution to Basin and Please Stop Monetizing DS

[micha]

for every time I've seen a trolloc use vials to pk longer i.e. run dusty to keep the fight going I've seen 10 other trollocs/fades burn vials (they keep 10 in their pockets the really bad ones) and sprint the opposite direction away from pk when they're low and worried about losing a kit.

I agree it's a pk oriented side. I would say +1 to making it not gold oriented but, I think there's more vials in the game than ever before. They're not coming from some secret wisdom factory and herb loads either. I think the changes to vials so you can't quaff them like the old school vials (now ciders?) was a good change but, they still grown on trees. I think the Basin should eat vials and not blood. I don't think gold really has a place on DS. That's all I got. He's right when he said don't forget about the pker in the pk mud. It's easy to focus on the other stuff sometimes but, pk is the reason I'm here. There are many like me hehe.

[micha]

When it comes to vials and movement points, trollocs have always suffered the worst from this. You can say that ds has fades but that relies on a particular class ALWAYS being available which it realistically never is. This was why I, as a predominantly darkside player constantly farmed vials in the past to the point where I had hundreds sitting around so that if I needed some or my allies did I was always able to provide and keep pk or raiding moving because the session would grow stale as humans just ran us all hag and bored us into doing stupid things through sheer frustration. As such I never really understood why they were made harder to obtain, load less and worth 2+ hits of the easiest coin giving smob on darkside (Deranged Ogier). That's just crazy to me. While flasks were somewhat of a breath of fresh air it still remains a bandaid for a mobility problem that has been ongoing for a long time.

how ever did we survive before vials grew on trees? We just dealt with it, and conserved moved, made tactical decisions, and walked a hard line. sometimes we died and we lost our nice kits because we had to fight lol. I don't think the mobility situation is as bad as people think. Fades are around alot and they manage alot of that. Compel was a huge boost honestly and is used as much or more than vials.

With the addition of clanned mounts (warhorses) every man and his dog has access to the upper teir of mounts which further imbalances the equation against trollocs. You see and hear it regularly now where trollocs just get sick of burning vials and moves chasing humans around and around and around on warhorses or better. It adds another level of frustration to pking on the side and is a clear disincentive to pursue pk. Not to point the finger but Draz is a fantastic example of this, running across multiple zones in much the way ss/ls pk used to function. Only the chasers here, while having a larger base move pool suffer from significantly reduced regen comparative to horses and cannot realistically keep up with human mounts over a pk session unless they are cashed up with vials which again costs significantly more time and quite often coin to obtain larger quantities of a necessary very much non optional in todays pk climate item. (see shops loading vials on ds for 40+ crowns).

in theory I'd say yeah you're right. I rarely see people riding them though for whatever reason in pk, I see a ton of warhorses and bloodstocks and grays still. Don't know why but, people are utilizing this. As far as pointing at Draz, survival is a real skill set and knowing when to leave and how to leave is an art that people often times overlook. Just kill him when you got him, or recoup and get ready to get him when he comes back.

Sadly though this all seems to be just a symptom of a larger issue which is the fact Darkside has been struggling for incentive and direction lately. I cannot speak for all of the players who have invested time on the side and view themselves as Darksiders at heart but personally it has become all but impossible to ignore the signs the side is struggling and the disenchantment many players have with the current direction the staff have taken away from ruthless racewar pk to some kind of pve-ish middle ground?

I'd say generations are changing. We have some old guys still playing but, realistically DS's major leaders aren't around doing the leader thing anymore. It's hard to get motivated when no one's driving that train and lately the conductors have been a little bitter in my opinion and kind of playing with a chip on their shoulder. That can't be fun for them and naturally it ripples out and affects everyone on DS, even LS because we don't get quality pk anymore. It's a very noticable change but, it's up to us to step up and make it fun and make it what we want. We can't rely and wait on people that are spotty or gone to rejuvenate us. Whether it be older leaders of the "golden age" of ds or IMM's. Just go out and crush it, have some fun. Try and bring people with you, that's all you can do!

I feel like a broken record when I say that it very much looks like Lightside is getting all the benefits from the immortals in recent times. Between the addition of smob reports, exp scalps, random rp quest points, clan mounts, additional stat bonuses to some channeler orientated clans, herald smobbing qps, smobbing quest points and the plethora of quests LS has available to them it often comes off feeling like favouritism to Lightside and neglect for Darkside.

I feel this is accurate. Very accurate. A majority of the mud spends time afk in city squares, some people pk, the rest smob or stat. I'd say 1/4 pk. It's trending towards pve right now. When you mention PK, people get wierd and are quick to cut you down if you mention incentivizing the pker or bonusing the pker in any way.. from staff to players. Strangest concept ever to me but, that's where it's come to. People would rather play "safely" and do heralds with friends than engage in real pk or risk dying with their kit. However, as far as the basin is concerned. I don't call crashing a smob group's effort to squeeze 2 qps out of 3 smobs real pk. I call it a pain in the ass when it happens lol. Did you really get pk or did you just get some scalps and gear for a little effort? I think rarely it breaks into LS making tactical decisions on the fly and fighting you guys back and getting somewhere, most of the time it creates mass chaos and people die and ruin their work they put in for the last 30 minutes to an hour (and time is precious because the player base has aged and 30 minutes or an hour means more now at 35 than it did at 25 with no responsibilities haha!) so.. you can see how this plays out.

We all talk about how pk is still the fastest way to obtain character progression in terms of rank and bonuses, while this is true there are now very, VERY easy avenues to pursue ranking and bonuses that are completely devoid of any requirement to pk. While these ways may take longer you can comfortably acquire 150 qps from questing things like Joncask and officer quests, 8 qps a day from heralds and however many clan quest points are available to you if your council members are active and changing the quests every 6 months? as is allowed. What this leads to is a general disincentive to engage in risky play to obtain the crucial progression statistic which is quest points. Where before it really was something forced upon players to some degree to move forward with their characters. PKing teaches people awareness, zone knowledge and gives them confidence to go out and about doing stuff with the knowledge that if someone decides to come and beat their head in they can hold their own or even turn it around on the attacker rather than running for the nearest city and waiting for the potential threat to go away so they can return to normal activities.

100% teaches you the game.

[Eol]

I must be taking crazy pills. I thought the flasks were an elegant solution and the best thing to be done for plain old non-special trolls in 10 years. There was never going to be a coded solution.

The Imms have repeatedly demonstrated with detailed posts that they know exactly how many Herald points are entering the game and the distribution.

The issue with money is that coin values for many opponents are the same as they were when I started the game. I've almost exclusively played troll lately and I thought the motivation level up for a lot of players was very high but opportunities were at times meh. I would personally reevaluate everything that has two legs and is north of Fall Dara. Ctf, all the new Shienaran mobs in Lockshear, wretches, ogier, scouts, mire Patty, elites dusty tower, dwellers, df mud golams, add some tarantula chests, shady Df rent.

[Spyder]

Wasn't a dig at Draz btw, just used him as an example of the run around style of pk.

[Lea]

I agree with a lot of what Spyder said. We need to create incentives for crossrace pk. The wars have generated an incentive for same side pk, and they have had positive effects for increasing player numbers on LS during war time. Now we need to turn that same attention to crossrace.

And as a side note: I also don't mind flasks as a nice way to bolster moves when you can't get vials/have few vials, and I don't think basin needed to be changed. The changes made the game safer.

[Baal]

They were always a nice way to bolster moves. They just took more work before. Introducing them for sale is what threw the basin out of balance.

And it only takes 1 vial to run away. If you use any more than that I don't even know where you're running to. The other 9 are for chasing. (Very few players carry 10 vials).

[Reyne]

We all talk about how pk is still the fastest way to obtain character progression in terms of rank and bonuses, while this is true there are now very, VERY easy avenues to pursue ranking and bonuses that are completely devoid of any requirement to pk. While these ways may take longer you can comfortably acquire 150 qps from questing things like Joncask and officer quests, 8 qps a day from heralds and however many clan quest points are available to you if your council members are active and changing the quests every 6 months? as is allowed. What this leads to is a general disincentive to engage in risky play to obtain the crucial progression statistic which is quest points.

I just feel like... so what? Why does everyone have to be pigeonholed into the same play style? *shrug* It's kind of nice that there's stuff to do when there's no PK happening otherwise it's just log in, "nar any pk?", wait a few mins, rent. If there's people out doing PvE stuff then you can go hit them because they're not sitting in a square waiting for something to happen.

That said I agree with the OP insofar as increasing incentives for PK on DS versus having things cost gold. If there are LS people out smobbing and doing PvE things then DS should be hitting them.

As for mobility I don't really get the clan horse complaint because people can otherwise just buy any number of warhorses for cheap, or otherwise they won't go pk blight on a trash horse and just sit FD instead. Either way it has nothing to do with DS not getting enough vials to stay mobile. Nerfing horses doesn't help with that, it just makes LS less mobile too.

Regarding mobility though, I wouldn't mind seeing group fade come back as a monthly change.

[Lea]

They were always a nice way to bolster moves. They just took more work before. Introducing them for sale is what threw the basin out of balance.

I don't think the basin is out of balance.

[Rig]

The problem lies in what Lea and a few others have said. There is no incentive to pk besides maybe mastering a bit faster. Also, as Dimst has said, one step forward two steps back. It's extremely frustrating when you get told things like "LS balance needs to be taken into consideration," when I know for a fact there's been a few changes to LS that DS balance was not taken into consideration. I'm not going to name some of those things based on the fact that they should be secret but you imms know exactly what i'm talking about.

Combined with the fact that pk is dung. Yes isabel/Enok, I called Marisue a tard. If you're using a weave that bashes so you get a free 200+hp worth of damage then you're gimmicky as firetruck and you know it. There's no reason to use it. The argument that it's considered essential over flame strike/fireball in the blight is beyond mind boggling to me. Anyway, this is off topic, back to the point.

You start changing everything about a side that has had no problems besides the fact that we receive very little love. I agree, LS is the bread and butter and it's what keeps this game going. Without LS there would be no DS or SS etc etc. However, the problem is that when you put all of this time and effort into adding new things and getting rid of any incentive for pk at all then what does the pk-based side do? They raid. You guys added the flame, that's awesome. It was a great change and it helps raiding. It has now become one of the primary tools used to raid. This is great, now there are two primary raiding tools.

Next you have the basin, the biggest tool in raiding and it's not even guaranteed. There's a huge chance that you will see either:
Newbies statting
Nothing
Someone sitting in their rent/coulin/whatever.

So now you have effectively taken away from the biggest tool used by the raiding/pk side. Less incentives to pk, again. Instead we're adding things like DS heralds which almost nobody does because we couldn't even kill the main smob on the first herald with 2 full groups. Combined with the fact that a lot of it is narrating mobs so it just brings humans to us, which is really making me not understand the point of the whole heralds and ds thing. Then we have a treasurer. Cool. We bought a few things, the treasurer is fine but other than that and HH'ing weapons/buying vials from shops there is no reason to farm gold on ds, and you don't need gold on ds. I don't want to spend my day on shitty trolloc mvs farming gold. I want to hh my weapon and go out and kill pukes.

Again, reiterating the point most of us have made, there needs to be reasons to pk. You're getting rid of them one by one and there's the excuse of these "new things coming in the near future" when it's been years and years and you guys haven't even helped us redo the DF system.

[Zeeb]

I think I got maybe 5 kills solo using basin over the last month...mostly shooting fish in a barrel but then again I'm pretty OP.

Basin alone wouldn't be bad, but combine it with flame and ways, I guarantee I can be on any target I basin in less then 3 tics with the exception of Iomm/treamalking/etc.

Using the basin as groups we got a big IOMM fight, another group smob fight and the Rolands fight with Dukug (see AoW!)

We also found some expers and they usually died.

The basin certainly added to the danger but I don't know how much it added to the PK. I'd guess maybe 1/4 times there was PK and the other 3/4 it was just someone dead with 0 chance.

So, my feeling is this has the effect that those people will be even less likely to leave cities, which is not good for business.

As far as changes LS/DS I can't comment except:
There are also DS heralds that were put in but are pretty hard and should just be changed to give altqps instead of the smob quests so they get used more?