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

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Foil
Posts: 81
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2015 1:10 pm

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

Post by Foil » Sat Dec 31, 2022 3:40 pm

I think what everyone is missing here is it isn't necessarily a dig at X clans requirements for admittance. This whole discussion is about the imbalance of requirements to join a bonused LS clan vs getting bonuses on DS.

The overall argument is DS has a streamlined system to bonuses (remorting) whereas the LS path to bonuses requires red tape, subjective votes, and at times lengthy murky requirements.

It's discussion based on why one side seems easier not wether clans are right. I'm not saying LS clans are right or wrong, but the sentiment expressed by me and others regarding the process is true and fact based when looking at the two sides comparatively.

Harun
Posts: 168
Joined: Wed Sep 02, 2015 9:45 pm

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

Post by Harun » Sat Dec 31, 2022 4:32 pm

It takes more time and effort to get a fade than it does either a Gaidin or a Wolfbrother. And, for most of at least the last 10 years, a lot of fading depended on other people: Chosen endorsements, aqps from clanning/ranking, who gets Tav scalps after a kill, who gets to turn in Justice, whether people are willing to help you hit cities and smobs, and so on. You can have bonded Gaidin within a few weeks.

reil
Posts: 161
Joined: Sat Apr 23, 2016 3:27 pm

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

Post by reil » Sat Dec 31, 2022 4:34 pm

Has anyone considered that it's relative difficulty rather than some sort of intrinsic difficulty? LS can be more annoying to play, but who actually struggles with horses and lights until you consider you have an alternative for playing something that doesn't deal with that sort of dung without much in the way of increased comparative difficulty in other ways?

I think what's sort of lost in the conversation is that the "streamlining" of DS used to come with a price of difficulty. But everything done to make the game more accessible, QOL, mobility, loads, and just the steady stream of fading/remorts, etc. chipped away that difficulty to the point where DS is more or less playing strong characters supported by stronger characters to end up with more stronger characters.

Meanwhile, by comparison, LS is now more difficult to play on unbonused characters and it has bonused characters that aren't "streamlined guarantees" (even though I think Gaidin might *literally* be this, but that's besides my point)? I get the frustration, but we're not dealing with an issue of bonuses or bonused clans - we're dealing with a balance issue between DS and LS and conflating it with things we specifically want out of the game rather than what would make the game less annoying or difficult.

I think a remort option might help, but it's not going to change the relative difficulty of LS vs. DS because now LS is the side where you play a harder road to remort and DS is where you still go for an easier road to remort. If you want to actually fix this dynamic, fix the gap between vanilla humans and vanilla trollocs. Take a look at a lot of the suggestions Eol made, they're (generally) pretty good ones.

Someone will eventually have to answer for why I don't enjoy PVEing or dealing with Tower politics but somehow don't have a Rank 8 KMG or rank 9 Aes Sedai already, but that's another problem for another day.

Eol
Posts: 704
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2015 10:34 pm

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

Post by Eol » Sat Dec 31, 2022 10:14 pm

My big things for the game

-Remove things that are objectively broken. Players will disagree on what that means.
*Reducing weave damage delivered in same tic - great change. "Modulated" a miserable experience.
*Sedai drain, "inkies", horse bash, earthquake, status weaves, troll fleelag. Variably bad.

-Continue to push for coding changes that benefit "everyone".
*Rank damage. Empowering.
*Class/rank based bonuses - a path for normalization. A QG rogue rank 7 and a Legion rogue rank 7 should be mostly the same other than RP.

-Within reason, eliminate the need to select a clan simply because of bonuses. In most cases, you shouldn't have to miss out because you wanted to join a clan that fits your roleplay or let's you clan with your friends.
*As above - class-to-rank bonuses. But more specifically - bonuses should in general respect underlying themes of the game. For example, while the whole Sedai-warder thing complicates it - but channelers in general shouldn't get a hps regen bonus because it defeats the whole theme of reducing their hitpoints to make them die faster. Similarly, channelers are already capped at 18 dex and have armor. Giving them a dexterity or dodge bonus defeats the point that channelers aren't actually meant to be the most defensive characters in the game.

*Here's a strange scenario in the spirit of that. One of the things about the game is that the statting system is so bad that no one ever sat down and came up with a real philosophy of the game. It was just a random hellhole of RNG insanity. You got nothing most of the time but sometimes you got everything. The stat caps are all over the place etc. In truth, we should have come up with a system where hunters, rogues, warriors etc all outclassed each other in different ways in the stat system. It never really happened though and what we all settled for (that is still way better than before) is just to allow everyone to have great stats. However, this does still create situations where we create abominations - historically I'm referring to dreadlords with 350+ defense and 340 hps. We've solved the hps problem somewhat but we still have ridiculous stuff. My take home here is - we need to be careful what we give people and more specifically - channelers should in general be given almost nothing except the ability to channel. It really is that powerful a bonus.

-Normalize perks and benefits across clans and races.
*As above - normalize most bonuses
*Normalize clan gear. In almost every single circumstance - the best items should not be issued. Creating issuable items that outclass rares is bad.
*A rank 8, dreadlord, fade shirt should all be equivalent.
*Channeler rank 8 sps perk should match the dreadlord sps perk. The dreadlord perk was put in during a bizarre and terrible time in the game when the Imms were doing ridiculous and absurd things like literally reducing the timer on dreadlord spells. The mentality then was absurdly broken.

-Question the long standing architecture of the game and the rationale for historical decisions.
*Learning to navigate the bureaucracy of the game doesn't excuse the problems with game.
*The solutions for so many problems within the game already exist. I'm hesitant to repeat myself but Blademasters, Wolfbrothers, and Kin were all solutions to problems that the game had along the way.
*Sedai seems to be resolving
*I don't know the solution to Gaidin. The real problem for me with Gaidin is similarly to wolfbrother. You get to earn the perks in a bonused organization - the bonus comes before the work. A rank 6 wolfbrother is "better" than a rank 7 anywhere else. I'll probably stop talking about Gaidin if drain gets fixed.
*Wolfbrother just makes way more sense as a tag at rank 8, +extra work or whatever. If you really want to grind your teeth I think WBs would be a lot easier to balance if we'd seen Elyas riding his trusty horse Long Hoof.

-Recognize that people's expectations of games have changed.

Tons of people have posted since I started writing this. I'm not ignoring you. I have children.

jafra
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2021 6:25 pm

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

Post by jafra » Sun Jan 01, 2023 8:24 am

imo DS is preferred because there's no white tower.

Sarinda
Posts: 687
Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:10 pm
Location: Kalamazoo, MI

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

Post by Sarinda » Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:07 am

After re-reading this thread in the new year, just wanted to highlight and repeat some of the themes I am seeing here that are within full control of players and could help contribute to a more enjoyable, fun environment on LS.

Players on LS can:
  • Foster a culture of teamwork and camaraderie
  • Invite others to participate in group activities, including announcing group activities over narrates
  • Create clear, streamlined enlistment and ranking tasks for public clans
  • Create fun, relevant clan council quests every 6 months to provide additional avenues for advancement
  • Help each other re-equip and XP more

I also wanted to shout out to a few people/groups I’ve seen doing some of the above recently:
  • Vhalerie, for leading smob groups and inviting people even when unclanned, and helping me level and re-equip on an unknown and unclanned alt
  • Rikkus, for leading in PK and then gathering the group afterwards to debrief and give other players constructive criticism on what we could have done differently to improve performance in the fight
  • Jeb, Ted, and others for seeking out PK and then narrating to invite others, which has gotten group PK going
  • Ylsa, Stokes, and other KMG members for stocking LMH but also going out of their way to help people get more equipment or to smob
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.

I also had the thought that although no one loves getting ganked by a huge group, I don’t worry that much about an unknown DF or MC doing something sneaky to suddenly kill me or get my group attacked when smobbing. One of my favorite recent PK sessions came from our group being attacked in gholam. If we have healthy attitudes about dying and help each other out more, even losing a full kit is less of a frustrating experience.

jafra wrote:
Sun Jan 01, 2023 8:24 am
imo DS is preferred because there's no white tower.
This makes me sad because I have always tried to contribute meaningfully to making the White Tower a fun clan and Aes Sedai feel attainable and still like a big accomplishment once you get there. If you or anyone has concerns about the Tower specifically, please feel free to reach out to me or post on a separate thread or in Discord and I would be glad to discuss.

marwell
Posts: 124
Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2017 6:50 pm

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

Post by marwell » Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:10 am

I’ve actually found more comaraderie on ds. LS seems to spread apart with everyone doing their own thing, with their own agendas.

Sarinda
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Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:10 pm
Location: Kalamazoo, MI

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

Post by Sarinda » Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:13 am

marwell wrote:
Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:10 am
I’ve actually found more comaraderie on ds. LS seems to spread apart with everyone doing their own thing, with their own agendas.
Right, I’m not saying LS is better at this. I’m saying that a lot of people are frustrated with these issues, and we LS players have the ability to be more intentional about working on the list I summarized above without any Imm changes or input needed. We have the capacity to make LS better by changing our culture and communication.

jafra
Posts: 103
Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2021 6:25 pm

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

Post by jafra » Sun Jan 01, 2023 12:05 pm

@Sarinda: Sorry, I should've made it clear that I was teasing about the White Tower thing. Appreciate all you do.

But in general LS has a lot more red tape that people don't want to deal with - it's not what we expect from a game in 2023. At some point it stops feeling like a game and more like a homework assignment. 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.

Detritus
Posts: 282
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2020 8:22 am

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

Post by Detritus » 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.


I made a lion warden applicant a while ago because i wanted a central clanned rogue i could use against raiding DS. Part of the(easy) application process was "show a ranked person around X". There was never a ranked person on unless i was willing to use OOC means to get one to log on or switch alts.

Nearly every basic clan(I dont care about "bonused" clans being difficult) if i wanted an alt known I could get someone to log someone on one from OOC but it's a rediculous how hard it can be to get clanned completely unknown(and i imagine the same for new players), purely from an activity standpoint some times of day.

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