What are things that make LS harder to play than DS?

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Callesa
Posts: 517
Joined: Wed Feb 18, 2015 2:45 pm

Re: What are things that make LS harder to play than DS?

Post by Callesa » Mon Jan 02, 2023 2:06 am

Detritus wrote:
Sun Jan 01, 2023 5:09 pm
I don't have any problem with the difficulty to get into any clan.

I have a problem with being reliant on playing during specific play times to be "active" or "seen".

Outside of holidays I mostly don't play unless i play while at work because the most convenient times for me to play are the quietest times of day on mud.
This is a very valid point. The extreme was my time as an Accepted, when I was given the advice "you should be more active" and "oh, we thought you were not active, just happy to play an Accepted from time to time", while I was putting in over 40 hours a week (more likely even more) and very unhappy with everything about FCs and especially Accepteds being destroyed (it was the era of years of Vivienne's changes). My main problem was being european.

This applies to other things too. I haven't seen a mobraid or global quest in ages. Most exp multipliers are turned on, when I am asleep. And so on.

I like that some things, such as more encouraged RP logs posting, are helping with the issue to some extent. But especially clans should have ways for people in different time zones to show activity, especially to create new groups of active players in those other time zones. For example in the Tower, we have the numbers to cover the 24h with some Aes Sedai, you are just more likely to meet some in some time slots than others. But most clans should be more aware of this issue. So, if you are an applicant failing to meet members, encourage logs sending, encourage second hand info from trusted allies seeing your applicant, etc. The in person availibility should not be the main problem, even though it certainly makes sense for it to be the primary way to get to know your applicant.

About some things raised: LS has improved a lot in awards. While I agree with Fuujin, that RP and smobbing QPS are rather low (but my example is not precise. I am sometimes taking really long breaks from the game for rl reasons), they are still much much higher than ages ago. And I think they should be even higher in some cases. Yes, more base QPs for RP would be good, but it could even be more clan based. More QPs for smobbing would be absolutely welcome, especially for any group smobbing!!! And three dailies would keep people more active and more likely to get into something more serious than one daily. Don't get me wrong, it is great to have something small to do every day. But if you have the time, you should not be discouraged from staying on the char with something to do (and hopefully encounter a new activity while doing so, such as someone calling for help with a smob or pk or something) and encouraged to alt hop only.
jafra wrote:
Sun Jan 01, 2023 12:05 pm
The other obvious problem is that multiple LS factions prevent people from grouping and having fun. With dwindling numbers I'm not sure that's an easily solvable problem.
The factions are a part of what makes WoT really WoT. My problem has been the destruction of player relationships and basic trust among the playerbase through some huge decisions. There are lots of fun factions. And with most players having several clanned chars, it should be no problem that some days, you play a Tower friendly alt, and some days a Tower unfriendly alt, some days a Seanchan, etc. The problem have been the mixed narrates and the amount of "not really LS" on the LS who list, and so on. The problem were people scared of grouping because "someone would surely tell DS on discord" or fear of Seanchan seeing stuff happening on narrates, not people not grouping because of valid RP reasons.

Elysia
Posts: 7908
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2015 1:29 pm

Re: What are things that make LS harder to play than DS?

Post by Elysia » Tue Jan 03, 2023 8:42 am

Sarinda wrote:
Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:07 am
Imms, is there any chance we could get a thread going in which people could routinely give shout outs to other players for doing something fun or friendly, and then give them 1-2 QP (if clanned) or 100 gold or something (if unclanned) per shout out? Would be a great way to both increase visibility of community building and to give back to players who make this place fun.
There already is a mechanism for people doing something friendly: the Pay it Forward thing, see viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2077&p=12182&hilit= ... ard#p12182 Pay it Forward, as well as rpkudos, are heavily underused btw. I keep having to remind people and then they go "oh yeah, right". Taking bets on someone thinking this -right now-. :idea:

I looked at leadkudos for people leading smobbing or pk, but the problem with that is that small rp interactions are usually between 2 or 3 people. If someone leads a full group and everyone is asked to drop a leadkudo, then... that will become a problem. Which is more likely to just mean popular players being awarded more than the people who start out leading getting awarded. I ended up abandoning the idea because of this. Mobol can't see who is leading either, otherwise that would be an option.

The best thing I came up with to date is giving councils the option of making it a council quest for x qps a month. People would have to post a log of them leading and then councils can award that in the same fashion as bonus pk qps (also underused) and the treasurer donations qps (use heavily dependent on clan). In similar vein, some clans also under utilize council quests. Clans have had the ability to award for live events they organize for ages and that's not utilized either. The posting of logs and awarding by council is also pretty time zone friendly. The tools are there, but it's on people to use them. Can lead a horse to water and all that...

At best/ worst I can see putting the rpkudos and pay it forward mobols on the same mob. Maybe that will help... :?:

Edited to add:

As a sidenote, this thread has pretty much run its course, since people aren't talking specifically about what makes LS harder than DS, but what would make their advancement easier. There are pretty much two camps: getting to a goal like Sedai, master etc. should feel like an achievement vs it should be easy. Quite a few posts are leaning towards the latter, but Staff feels it should be balanced. It should be an achievement, but it should not be -too hard-. I think we took great strides towards that in the past 5 years.


Note that timezones are a different beast altogether. An Australian DS player will also not advance as quickly or have as easy a time because there's less people to do things with as well as less people to pk. That has nothing to do with LS vs DS, but with the spread of players across timezones.

Aureus
Posts: 968
Joined: Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:13 pm

Re: What are things that make LS harder to play than DS?

Post by Aureus » Tue Jan 03, 2023 2:31 pm

Lots of good feedback here, thank you. Here is the summary from my perspective:
  • Horse quality of changes are good, anything else like that that is a positive QOL improvement and can go a long way.
    • We are going to remove horse bash/stab/charge for players in combat that can auto-rescue their horse (level 5+).
    • We are going to make your led horses flee with you if you have level 5+ ride.
    • We'll add a command to both dismount and lead. Probably just "lead mount" while riding. If you're in combat, this will probably require very high ride.
    • We already have moon phase and semi-dark/light code in the queue to make it easier to get around if your lantern burns out.
    • ...if you have other suggestions, please start a thread and add them!
  • Bonuses are concentrated in a handful of small clans, late game progression (remort) doesn't exist for LS, and there's a subset of people who are very motivated by mechanical progression and having something to achieve. We'll talk about this one. We aren't interested in turning WB or other clans into a remort or open clanning system, but agree that having bonuses concentrated in WB, BT, Kin and White Tower isn't ideal for players that don't mesh well with the clan (feels like you very quickly run into a lack of options).
    • White Tower is the best of the bunch since it's very open, whereas WB and BT are very small and Kin has very strict roleplaying requirements so isn't for everyone.
    • This is also sort of an interesting one in that Gleeman is another bonused clan, but you don't hear the same complaints and you also don't see a lot of overlap between the people wanting to clan WB, BT, etc and the people wanting to to clan Gleeman. I think some of it comes down to RP and what appeals to particular people. So while we will look at broadening the list of options and take a look at progression systems, parts of this are inherent to having unique clan identities and we aren't going to change that since it feels like a strength of the LS clan system.
    • We have kicked around the idea of a Great Captain and Blademaster remort upstairs (which would involve reclaiming the Blademaster flag, so that's kind of a mixed bag). They would almost certainly not stack with Warder and WB. We'd have to think through the progression part of it (I think part of what people like about fade especially is there's more to do after you remort).
  • DS's home zones feel "safer" than LS, which is odd for the experienced/harder side.
    • We've made a fair amount of progress here already, so I don't feel like this is as much of an issue these days.
    • The changes we've made to shift the "best" smob loads out of Blighted zones and more into the south or contested zones like gap/etc have probably been good, since these can spur PK and avoid one side having "safe" access to the best gear. DS needs to be able to re-eq with generally smaller numbers, but things like gold rings/obsids/etc don't need to load in almost completely safe zones such as old KoI.
  • LS is more fractured, narrates sometimes don't feel safe.
    • Removal of unknown DF was a good thing, and any new system needs to strongly avoid incentives to spy on LS or report their location to DS. This sort of system was ok in 2001ish with 200+ players online and doesn't work now.
    • There's a change already waiting for Flash's review that will split SS out from LS narrates, but reintroduce shouts as a shared PK channel for SS/LS. They'll continue to share chats as well. Could probably expand that to treat Known DFs similarly.
    • Cross-race narrate spying. This is one that happened in the past but we don't hear much about today. I agree it is detrimental. So just to be clear here: if we were to catch it today, those players would be very, very unhappy (likely banned). It is very lame.
And there's the good discussion around clanning requirements on LS vs DS generally. That's really in players' hands, but I do encourage you to look at your clanning requirements through the lens of a newer player, and with the goal of trying to get newer players into a clan relatively quickly. Kryyg has a funny anecdote that his BG clanning involved mainly leading to GK, and him leading the group into it (whoops!). If it takes longer than a week to clan in most clans, that's perhaps too long. CRS and QG are a really good models here, and I think Red Eagles have taken steps recently as well to make it simpler.

Going to lock this thread to keep it from veering off course as I think we've hit a lot of the main points, but a really good discussion.

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