Wheel of Time MUD

So where did this all start? The decision somewhere along the way that there are too many vials in game. Vials are a consumable item. They're like rice, noodles, potatoes. A diet staple. They will always be in demand and therefore are unlikely to devalue too much - and they never did.

There's no such thing as too many noodles unless it's cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Anyone that has ever played DS knows that vials are a diet staple. Without them PK is stagnant and you have situations of humans sitting dusty wondering why nobody bothered chasing. They keep the flow going. So even if someone has such a hoarding problem that they have 500 of them in rent - it doesn't really matter. Their basement is probably full of canned beans too. You can still only use so many vials in a given time period, just like you can only eat so many beans in a day.

Okay, so vials are downed. DS complains. Someone introduces flasks of blood into the stores. Before that, blood had value. You had to kill someone to get it. Which basically means you need to PK to do it. It's rare. Most people use it for moves. Every once in a while someone has collected enough to basin. Half the time you come up with someone killing saplings in Tear. Every once in a while you get something good enough to start PK with. You still need to get to whoever you basined and hope that you can get there before they move too far away. It was never a sure thing.

The key point being that you needed to PK to get it. Not get gold and buy it. DS is a PK-oriented side and doesn't need more things to buy with gold. They don't need a sink. There's no market and even the fade treasurer is silly. Keep the goals PK-oriented. This game offers a lot for a lot of different players but at it's heart it's still a PK mud and it needs to be fostered.

tl;dr, restore basin to it's former glory, get rid of blood flasks in the stores, give ds pk-oriented goals

+1

Makes sense to me.

Well said. If basin is an example of what’s to come, I don’t see how anything currently in the game wouldn’t be under scrutiny to be downed/removed, coding aside.

But if the number of players(low numbers) contributed to the change and the staff admitted that’s the reason, then why such profound changes like the rare weap reduction campaigns, when it impacts so few players?

Seems like there’s a tug of war between really ambitious projects that would thrive with a robust playerbase, meanwhile micro managing changes based on low numbers at the same time.

Make basin great again.

+1

One step forward, two steps back - that's always been the DS dance. And so much for Vampa's vaunted claim to want the MUD to be more dangerous. The Staff might as well just remove the basin completely, not leave it in this neutered state.

Given how the basin actually works, it now is a real roll of the dice when 60+ % of the time youll get newbies or someone sitting Coulin. I think it was good how it was because the sacrifice of potential life saving moves and coin for the low chance you'll find something far away that might be worth trying to kill.

For the whole idea of currency on DS, I have always thought the concept absurd. Unless you have a time invested footing on darkside, particularly a rogue with search coin is MUCH harder to acquire en-mass. You could use the example of the cost of honing and hardening weapons. It is more work for a player on darkside to obtain the 225 crowns to buff their weapon than it is to do the same on Lightside. I never understood the logic behind this as trollocs having lower base ob than mounted humans means they already require those improvements to be at a competitive level with pukes in both bashing capability and damage output.

A thought perhaps is this could be changed to instead of trollocs needing coin, a number of smob scalps (2, lets say DO/SK) could be used to obtain a level 1 warding(hone) and a higher teir smob scalp like KoI or Korvak to get your level 2 warding(harden). This would encourage group activity on darkside and negate the constant need for coin for what is likely the biggest coin sink on the side. It would also aid in re- eqing players and boosting peoples activity through social and quantifiable means. This is just one means of removing the dependence on coin for the side.

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.

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).

I would like to know why free warhorses were implemented though? They were a large gold sink particularly in the north for human pkers. It could even have been seen as a balance for the costing of vials for ds as warhorses have always been of a comparative average price to that of vials at a darkside shop. Now that is gone and anyone with half a brain can bring a couple of clanned horses up north, the pale destriers that litter Fal Dara and the fd road often are a great example. I felt this went against the grain of all the gold sinks that were implemented and would love to understand the rationale there.

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 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.

While I like and have enjoyed the fact there is plenty to do on Lightside I cannot help but feel Darkside has been left behind in terms of staff love. I do understand that without a healthy LS that the game does not function at all. However mob raids, blodfest additons , changes to N rk zone (still wtfing this one) and the flame don't make up for the change in direction the game has taken towards pve and crafting. Before anyone mentions the ways, these are a bonus to EVERY side and as such i removed them from consideration as a bonus for a particular side. Humans can use these just the same way as we can though often for different reasons (escaping/raiding/smob access).

When you create an atmosphere based around pve, then pve players will play. That demographic of players often do not want to engage in pk that comes to them let alone hunt for pk. When you have an entire side whose activity is wholly bound around cross-race pk that is always going to be detrimental to that particular side when the flow of the game changes away from a racewar to a smob farming/questing environment. Now you double down on this by making smobbing that much safer by adjustments made to the basin both now and previously.

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.

To go further, removing the QPS from questing that leaves 850 qps to obtain master status, which lets be honest is one of the driving pursuits of WoTMUD players. Let us the say that you gain an average of 1 smob QP per day of doing heralds you can complete the remaining 850qps from smobbing in 95 daily cycles of heralds. For many players who don't know how to pk or are highly conservative or flat out scared this is a much more viable, consistent and safe option for gaining those points toward character progression/bonuses. It gives them the social aspect without ever having to really venture out of their comfort zones and improve themselves as players. It may look slow to some of these 3-12 week seasoned pker rank racers but that is master Qps inside a year only doing herald runs twice a week. A lot of people would think that's a bloody good outcome for minimal risk.

Now, I am sure someone will say that 'oh quest points is only one of the things that makes people drawn to pk' that may be partly true. BUT it's a feeder. A player comes and learns to pk because they want to progress their character and ends up gaining enjoyment from learning pk and experience/confidence. As it stands now the ease of access to non pk quest points stands as a disincentive to players engaging and growing through pk progression such as in the past. You can see this in the opportunisitc malk/well sitting behaviour of some players. They're not willing to go looking for pk, through either laziness or fear that they will die having never really felt they got the chance at getting some quest points.

I'm really open to trying to improve things for all sides, however I can't help but feel much of what is said falls on deaf ears or there is some plan that's being adhered to that is trying to push darkside into a quiet death. We talk about Lightside lacking consistent and competent leadership though the environment we have now does not really foster it at all. Between murderers, warring factions and the general opportunistic nature of particularly northern pk it does not promote an atmosphere in which lightsiders band together for pk like they once did and like darkside do.

This is only my opinion but I've spent 15 years playing a side that I love and its firetrucking heartbreaking to see things in the state they are now. I know many of my ideas and thoughts have personal bias attached to them but for the love of god immortals please start listening to darkside we're crying out for you guys to just hear us out, and not dismiss what we as day in and day out residents of a side have to say.

Sorry for probably derailing Baal, this post ended up being more than I had thought when I clicked reply.

@Spyder: I'm not sure the Basin, or attention to DS in general is the real problem. People just aren't having as much fun as they used to and that goes beyond game content. I think many players who are as accomplished as you, Spyder, or Razhak etc, are mostly done with the game. Rig, for instance, is constantly upset about "dung-pk". A couple of years ago, when Rig was still just a lowly trolloc who begged people for rares , he would fight anywhere and anyhow, regardless of the quality of the pk. Same with most other players who were pursuing a remort or a new master. Eventually, you run out of things to do.

To be frank, most of us are very long time players. You play out of habit in the hopes of that elusive pk that brings back those feelings you had in 2004. At the end of the day though, re-play value over 15 years is pretty firetrucking great and even though I agree with some of the points you make (like clan horses, seriously...) I can't help but feel that it's not really about the tweaks and the patching anymore.

I've played several different games for an extended period of time and WoTMUD is the only one I still come back to. What they all have in common is this very type of discussion. I mean, even if statting was taken care of tomorrow we wouldn't suddenly see an influx of new players. We might see some returning ones, but with pre-rolled stats available, staff has pretty much done what they can at this point. I played a lot of WoW for a while and people were complaning about features, PvP balance, bosses and everything in between, neglecting the fact that just maybe they had outgrown the game.

As for the OP, limiting DS access to Basin is not going to do anything positive for pk. If that's the goal, then mission accomplished.

Baal wrote:tl;dr, restore basin to it's former glory, get rid of blood flasks in the stores, give ds pk-oriented goals

And yeah, this basically.

I think you are overestimating the impact the herald qps have. Sure there are a handful of players who seem to be doing this daily, but I'd wager that they'd be doing that regardless if it gave QPs or not, just like most people did before. For myself I liked the addition that I could go smobbing if no PK was around and not feel like I was wasting my time getting a couple abs basics that would end up in a barrel somewhere, but end up with a 2-4 qps, it would keep me logged on at least and maybe PK would pick up. I think PK has probably just taken a hit due to the low numbers around these days.
I think Baal hit the nail on the head with the purchasable human blood. Basin needed a change if you can endlessly buy human blood. So maybe the flasks need to go to make basin useful again.

Also agree with most of what Enok said, think that sums it up very nicely. At least for me the appeal of wotmud has been slowly diminishing(sp?) these past months, PK doesn't seem as fun as it used to be.

Think clan horses allow us to go further north make pk happen. When people say "xyz is running us haggard" - I don't know if anyone is doing that purposely (how is that fun as a consistent playstyle?) as much as that they are moving to their zones because too many opponents showed up. Or they would be using their moves to keep the opponent split, while they whittle down. Instead of saying down clan horses, why not just say up the vials or whatever DS needs to keep their mobility going so that when someone falls back from Blight to blands (yuck ) or winding/dusty, then the pk can continue?

Not to derail but I think the issue with why the game has become so boring is that we don't have dedicated clan leaders and clans don't actually function as cohesive teams, so there's little incentive or possibility of someone actually investing in the clan. Ultimately this is a team game, but we don't have team building except very sporadically. People are often running around clueless (if they are newer) or else with conspiracy theories about game politics (if they are older) or just with a lot of dislike for a majority of the playerbase (if they are oldbiest ).

If we want to have fun, we need to stop seeing other players as people we have to constantly disrespect (thinking of Rig's casually thrown in 'tard like Marisue' just from the last forums read - or the stuff around Taziar - I don't know Marisue or Taziar personally - but it's typical for some players to abuse their opponents if they didn't like the pk).

And maybe just form more close knit units with the people we like to play with, encourage overall clan cohesion, support people who are trying to make the game fun for everyone, respect other people's playstyles (The fact that some people enjoy the chill-ness of porting around the game and hitting smobs, or some people like to stat and do nothing else - why do people judge that? they don't complain when you kill them - why make it a point to kill them AFK to show you're superior or something?).

Is it not fun to have a few people you can actually pk consistently with, and be up against another team of players who seem to have some coordination and leadership? We could actually get something that's challenging, and fun, and exciting.

Anyway, I doubt this will happen on wotmud. Even though I've got a lot of love from this game and a love for this game, and I know other people here have that too, I don't think we all have the cooperation or respect for each other to do that in our lifetimes.

(disclaimer: depressed because of our stupid election results and 4 more years of nightmare right-wing fanatic leader so i probably sound really negative)