These are basic questions that will help understand moving the way TP works toward this direction and why to do it.
Now I don’t have a lot of information and I am making my best guess on the majority of these statements yet I will do my best to be rational and come up with the best answers I can to these questions.
The problems with TP in its previous state that I can see are
1. The majority of TP has been accumulated by a very small number of players. I don’t have any numbers but just looking at Reaver list I can bet
that a very large % of total TP active in the mud is owned by one player and his alts (Jaster obviously).
2. New and Inexperienced players simply don’t have the tools to gain TP consistently because well they are new and inexperienced.
3. The loss of Seanchan side has reduced the total number of TP in the game (not sure this is true but it seems like a decent assumption to make)
4. It has no real value. It is just simply a measure of achievement.
There may be more issues that I haven’t considered but this seems like a decent start. In reality though these issues are not really an issue at all because TP was worth nothing but a trophy. If you get enough it puts you on a list of people that have enough and that was pretty much it.
Looking at the implementation of adding TP to smobs and adding the ability to exchange TP for QP. The problems that are directly addressed by the changes seem to be 2, 3, and 4. This makes sense because addressing problem one is going to be punishing players for using the previous system in the way it was intended to be used. The most prolific players will be punished the hardest.
Problems with the new Implementation
1. The rate of TP gain from smobbing will always be too high. Simply put there is now a low risk consistent way to gain TP. Over time the TP gained from smobbing will overtake the TP gained from PK. Right now you can gain 10 to 15 TP in about 2 hours or less. Zones repop around every hour. The amount of PK that would have to happen to consistently gain that rate would have to be non stop.
2. The killing of critical patties and smobs for TP only reduces the chances of future PK. Right now Ragan, Commy, and Kajin are consistently dead. How many players are willing to walk into the blight with 0 fall back points. PK is the driving force behind this game. The goal should be to incentivize PK.
3. Players are incentivized to avoid PK rather than engage. My first smob run for TP my group ran into 3 players outside of blodfest. We were a group of 5 trollocs. Did we engage and fight them? No. There was several different statements of why people couldn’t pk right at that moment. Instead we went back up north and killed Beast Master.
Possible Ideas?
Unrelated to TP one of the issues I see with PK in the game is when people choose to fight. I see some pretty consistent statements in narrates about how people can’t be bothered to fight certain players because they are annoying or there are too many FC’s or things of this nature (understand I play DS the majority of the time so I only have the DS as a reference point). A LS player hits the scout in gap and the first question in narrates is who is it? Once people know who the player is then people decide if they are going to participate in PK. Believe me I am very much guilty of this as well. I needed to point this out because I wanted to possibly address this problem as well as the problems with TP with my idea.
Now I don’t know what the coding limitations are or the limitations of mobol. So I am going to simply state my idea of a better implementation and hope the coding or mobol limitations don’t make this impossible.
1. Get rid of scouts in their current form. Scouts just feel outside of game like someone asking you “Hey good sir would you like a match of PK?”. Scouts purpose is to make finding PK easier but the side effect is that people only accept certain PK against players they want to fight.
2. Add new mobs (perhaps multiple locations) that narrate north of RK (for LS) and south of FD (for DS) not in a city or fortified location.
These mobs would have high health and don’t attack back. The health of the mob would reset on another player of the same faction being in the room of the mob being attacked.
3. The mobs would drop an item. This item can be turned in a single location for each side not in a city or fortified location. The turn in would require a very long timer possibly even sitting to make it very dangerous to turn in.
a. Getting attacked resets the timer.
b. Having other players of the same faction in the room during the timer resets the timer.
c. Turning in the item grants TP to all players of the same faction in the zone based on the levels and TP of the players on the opposite faction’s who list.
4. If the item is turned in and your on the opposing faction you lose TP based on your current TP and player level.
5. If the mob of your faction narrates you are given a status. The status is a type of no rent. You can still rent but if you do you lose TP based on your current TP and level.
6. If a player picks up the item of their faction the item is dissolved and returns to the mob upon repop.
7. no smobbing for tp
The concept of this is to give a more aligned goal to fight and make it possible for a smaller group to defend their mob and item. If the a players faction mob is killed and the item is taken then they can still defend at the turn in mob. Making the turn in mob easy to get to for the opposite side means that if a faction wants to turn in the item they are pretty much going to have to kill the opposing faction player.
What do you guys think?