What Does This Have To Do With Shadowbane?

[Venkman]

I don't mind leveling in PvP games as long as the levels are irrelevant to power in PvP. Just rip off Planetside. The more levels you have, the more points you can spread across equipping various bits of gear. But your raw power is based on what you do in combat, regardless of level.

So you can do quests in PvE to level up to be able to bring more gear to PvP combat. Or you can jump right into PvP with your newbie shooter and still do some damage.

And once you hit the soft cap once, you /level alts to the soft cap. None of this grinding the worst-half of the level spread crap.

And no death penalties at all, beyond respawning at bind point. Wizards from the 12th dimension can prevent souls from entering eternity by capturing departing spirits within a crucible formed around an inanimate carbon mass. Upon capture, the soul inhabits the new form, morphing it into the mind's vision of itself, and that form is sent back into battle.

If people can't buy that, they go play VG.

[stray]

Uh, by death penalty, do you just mean experience? Because I'll have none of this "non-lootable corpses" nonsense. ;)

[sinij]

Uh, by death penalty, do you just mean experience? Because I'll have none of this "non-lootable corpses" nonsense. ;)

Full looting is tricky to get right -not only you need to make sure that all gear is easily obtainable, you also need to make sure that good gear does not give too great of an advantage to lock losers into perpetual losing.

[tazelbain]

Main ‘flaws’ in SB that need to be addressed (and I’m very curious to see how this will play out) is delegation of responsibilities, land control and off-time things to do for unwashed masses of underprivileged grunts. I believe its all symptoms of one main problem.

I’m also curious to see if they attempt to move away from ‘spawn camp’ mentality and instead try something different – NPC nations, NPCs in service of PCs or anything else. I think its time we put idea of magically appearing monster with loot out of nowhere to rest – all loot should be generated in some way from resources that should be extracted and processed by somebody.

The only part of Shadowbane that wasn't a total screw up was the class system once the respec was in place.  I like your ideas but I think you have rebuild the it from the ground up.  From the ToL mechanic on up.

My SB like idea...  ToL, mines, and monster den spawn randomly around the world.  A baby ToL would belong to nobody and need to be feed (make it a puzzle, each tree likes different stuff) after a certain amount of time the tree will choose its guild.  The guild can build its city, but first it needs to secure mines and/or trade with another to gather the resources needed.  These resources are not tangiable.  Getting resources from a mine or a trading partner requires npc caravans.  You pay the npcs a deposit that is lost if the caravan is destroyed.  Caravans are like buffets to monsters (and to players for the deposit) so you'll have to defend your caravans and keep you area clean of monster dens.  The bigger your empire is, the more you have to defend. For seiges, ToL will spawn random Mana Founts which feed the tree and provide buffs.  Monsters like to bath in them but they don't destroy them. To siege a tree, someone must capture the founts for an extended period and starve the tree.  Everything on the map can be destroyed and will respawn elsewhere keeping the map from being static.

Basicly people are free to do what they want but there are lots of small objectives to provide structure.

[Venkman]

Uh, by death penalty, do you just mean experience? Because I'll have none of this "non-lootable corpses" nonsense. ;)

Good question. I'm not a fan of loot-based games in PvP. PS uses easily-replaceable equipment. However, a primary retention system is loot and the ever-increasing quality of it.

We get into a whole world vs game discussion here, but I'd effectively model it around old UO. You can have open PvP with safe ways for users to get in, and then once they're at the soft cap, it's FFA within reason. Equipment can be looted from your enemy because they probably bought it from crafters or have crafter alts themselves. Then the game becomes a bit like SB was in theory: control an area to gain primo access to the resources within.

There's a lot that could be done with this. Ultimately, 3D old-world UO with better safety for newbs would be a good experience to model, in my opinion. The game has depth to offer but doesn't force people to bother.

[tazelbain]

Lootable equip is the most anti-newbie mechanic ever.

The only way it would acceptable to me is if there was something like guild armory that was keeping a stock of solid equipment to use.  More as function of my guild's resource management than weather or not I have a pocket crafter or not.

[Venkman]

Every rule in the game does not need to apply to every character in the game at all times.

This is becoming something for the Game Design section, but I like it here better :) Without bothering with too much detail at this point, the key is to bracket players by their relative interest and investment in the game. A newbie should not be having their gear looted unless they got that gear automatically from the game and can do so again (like the static terminals and that big truck thing with portable terminals).

They key is to not have users fall too much in love with their gear until later. The early game is about getting them acclimated to the them, UI and motivations. The mid-game is about introducing them to their larger potentials. The late-game is about giving them the epic struggles that made them curious about the game itself. And the end-game is about living there, doing the epic, alts, crafting, everything else. At that point, or if they get into a guild with a microeconomy, THEN they can either go around and be marginally effective with whatever the game itself dispenses for free, or get better gear from other players who craft it. To do the latter you need a system of resources, resource gathering and crafting, a secondary game where characters are specifically doing that. And you probably want walled cities, civic zoning, NPCs making up for things players don't want to do (maybe like SB's crafting), and so on. And the ability to loot cash from players and monsters, or pull resources from the earth to sell to other towns.

Basically, to do ANY of this requires a lot more thought that throwing out pockmarked features ;)

But the gear can be lootable. Like we all did in early UO: we didn't wear our Sunday Best into dungeons. We wore what we could get more of.

It can't be DAoEQWoW though.

[tazelbain]

WAR be should tell us a bit what it takes to get newbies involved.

I always thought that the newb transition was the weak-link.  UO: No transition. Walk outside the city, get smoked.  Shadowbane: Put them in a pve safe zone, complete waste of time. They move to a safehold. They learn to flee the bottomfeeders.  They move to the zerg guild or neutral guild in the hopes to have a safe level area to level.  They never leave the PvE mindset and they have no skills for PvP.  EvE same thing but not as bad.

A small RvR frontier would be a great newbie area.  Make a couple safe cities.  Place all the elements one expect to encounter in the main area to fight over in between them.  Give them some pvp practice and character who isn't a sitting duck before you force them into the cruel world.

[HaemishM]

That's a whole lot of words to say "We're developing a game that we can't tell you anything about other than we aren't building our own engine for it."

[WayAbvPar]

My only hope is that with a company name like Stray Bullet, it won't be fantasy-themed. Wild West or cyberpunk, kthx.

[Signe]

My only hope is that with a company name like Stray Bullet, it won't be fantasy-themed. Wild West or cyberpunk, kthx.

I'm ready for nearly anything else except fantasy, science fiction or fantasy science fiction.  Ho hum.

[HaemishM]

I could take science fiction, as long as it wasn't PVE faux twitch.

[Rasix]

No elves. PLEASE NO MORE ELVES. 

[sinij]

I'm ready for nearly anything else except fantasy, science fiction or fantasy science fiction.  Ho hum.

Retards on official SBG games demanding Elves to be put into new game. Fucking fruitcakes.

[LC]

Every lame generic fantasy race you can think of.
An equal number of generic fantasy gods.
Each race is loyal to one god.
The gods hate each other.
The races kill each other to please their gods.


I think that was the idea Ashen Temper spoke of.

[Triforcer]

WAR be should tell us a bit what it takes to get newbies involved.

I always thought that the newb transition was the weak-link.  UO: No transition. Walk outside the city, get smoked.  Shadowbane: Put them in a pve safe zone, complete waste of time. They move to a safehold. They learn to flee the bottomfeeders.  They move to the zerg guild or neutral guild in the hopes to have a safe level area to level.  They never leave the PvE mindset and they have no skills for PvP.  EvE same thing but not as bad.

A small RvR frontier would be a great newbie area.  Make a couple safe cities.  Place all the elements one expect to encounter in the main area to fight over in between them.  Give them some pvp practice and character who isn't a sitting duck before you force them into the cruel world.

Er, I don't think that's a good idea.  Falls under the heading of "first impressions determine everything".  Its like playing Rallos Zek in EQ year 1-2- when you have a lvl 5 naked wizard pk in Kelethin and kill someone within 10 seconds of their character appearing in the game for the first time ever, they say things like "thanks jerk, I'm never playing a pvp server again".  Literally, the first seconds/minutes of someone's experience can't have pvp unpleasantness.

[tazelbain]

Hmm, I don't think you can learn anything about PvP from PvE reskinned to PvP.  I agree about first impressions which why it is crazy to drop newbies into a strictly PvE newbie area in a predominately PvP game.  No way wacka fozzle is going to give them accurate impression about SB or prepare them for bleak future in an open PvP enviroment.

Let me choose a class, give basic equipment and skills and point me to the area with enemy noobs.  The only reason to kill an npc is because they interfere with you completing a PvP objective.

[Merusk]

No elves. PLEASE NO MORE ELVES. 

With no Elves, there can be no Elf Boobies.

With no Elf boobies, there can be only tears.

Yet, in PvP games with Elves as playable characters, sides are horribly imbalanced and the PvP invariably is labeled as "Suxor"

Clearly, the elves must be NPC slave women.

[Nonentity]

WAR be should tell us a bit what it takes to get newbies involved.

I always thought that the newb transition was the weak-link.  UO: No transition. Walk outside the city, get smoked.  Shadowbane: Put them in a pve safe zone, complete waste of time. They move to a safehold. They learn to flee the bottomfeeders.  They move to the zerg guild or neutral guild in the hopes to have a safe level area to level.  They never leave the PvE mindset and they have no skills for PvP.  EvE same thing but not as bad.

A small RvR frontier would be a great newbie area.  Make a couple safe cities.  Place all the elements one expect to encounter in the main area to fight over in between them.  Give them some pvp practice and character who isn't a sitting duck before you force them into the cruel world.

Reminds me of Asheron's Call. Was playing on Darktide again for old times sake, and literally, you don't finish loading out of the portal from the tutorial before you get impaled by some UA guy with a hollow weapon.

Er, I don't think that's a good idea.  Falls under the heading of "first impressions determine everything".  Its like playing Rallos Zek in EQ year 1-2- when you have a lvl 5 naked wizard pk in Kelethin and kill someone within 10 seconds of their character appearing in the game for the first time ever, they say things like "thanks jerk, I'm never playing a pvp server again".  Literally, the first seconds/minutes of someone's experience can't have pvp unpleasantness.

[WindupAtheist]

Retards on official SBG games demanding Elves to be put into new game. Fucking fruitcakes.

And dwarves.  And vampires.  And velociraptors.  Jesus Christ.  It's like there's no game, so a bunch of retarded kids are making one up.

"AN' IT SHOULD HAVE LAZER FIGHTS AND VAMPIRES AND ALL THE VAMPIRES CAN FLY OMG AWESOME!"

[WayAbvPar]

If I could play a flying velociraptor vampire I might subscribe for a month.

[HaemishM]

Said velociraptor vampire must have lasers that go PEW PEW or else I'm not touching it.

[Merusk]

You're still forgetting the elf boobs.


Man, if only we could get a bitchin' Sam Primary drawing of this game.  We'd be rolling in teh doh.

[squirrel]

You're still forgetting the elf boobs.


Man, if only we could get a bitchin' Sam Primary drawing of this game.  We'd be rolling in teh doh.

Yeah hey whatever happened to the Sam Primary drawings? I enjoyed the hell outta those.

"Preggers LOL!"

[sinij]

And dwarves.  And vampires.  And velociraptors.  Jesus Christ. 

Jesus Christ can go in, as long as they implement crucifixion.

[UnSub]

And dwarves.  And vampires.  And velociraptors.  Jesus Christ. 

Jesus Christ can go in, as long as they implement crucifixion.

No-one likes a perma-hold that also does killer DPS.

[sinij]

But you can res, make wine and walk on water. Almost as good as shaman.

[Velorath]

Text in green for sarcasm? Doesn't that defeat half the point of sarcasm?

Possibly.  But it avoids a lot of fights and misunderstandings.

So it defeats the whole point of sarcasm?