Posts made by Tempest

TL;DR I used to read allll the Fantasy novels when I was a teenager. Wheel of Time, Dragonlance, Drizz't, and all that.

MUDding and then MUSHing was sort of like getting to 'play' in one of those worlds.

All the fun happens in the hog pit.

Come get dirty with the rest of us.

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

That's assuming all voices are equal, or that half are even heard.

I'm sure the people who talk to Apos/KQ/etc daily via pages or on discord, or what have you, have way more input than the average player.

This is true of every game ever made and is not unique to Arx. People with the ear of staff, "staff-friends", tend to have a higher priority than others.

All you can do is either trust staff to be fair enough to try, or out their nepotism or hypocrisy on some kind of web site set up for it.

Maybe one that you're posting to right now.

(edit: but not this thread, which is about constructive criticism on Arx's systems.)

Creating an echo chamber seems like a bad idea.

That's constructive criticism.

@thenomain said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

And then you only get feedback from the players you like and actually talk to, and they're generally not going to be honest about things

If they're bad players, you have a pretty valid point, but considering that Arx has about 100 players on at any given time, I doubt they're that worried about the echo chamber.

Unless they criticize and ban players with negative feedback.

Depending on how they present it, sure, sometimes people deserve to get banned or sneered at online and publicly, but if everyone trusts staff to behave civil as their first interaction with everyone, then they won't have a problem.

Mind you, I was recently told the KQ was not officially staff anymore, but I'm sure I'm getting outdated information.

That's assuming all voices are equal, or that half are even heard.

I'm sure the people who talk to Apos/KQ/etc daily via pages or on discord, or what have you, have way more input than the average player.

@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

So thanks for the idea of this thread, but we get goodfeedback talking to players directly and aren't really getting the kind of suggestions we'd hope for. If you have feedback, take it through the official channels in game or on github, we are abandoning this MSB-staff-interfacing to focus on what we think is important, and fun.

Back to your regularly scheduled posting.

And then you only get feedback from the players you like and actually talk to, and they're generally not going to be honest about things, because either the current state benefits them, or they're afraid to be honest with you and lose their staff buddy.

But, as you will.

@arkandel said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest Even though having XP caps is certainly one way to address specialization, it bears pointing out it's not the only way, and that it has side effects - such as disincentivizing established players from earning more XP by participating in the game's systems that reward it.

I've yet to see any other way of addressing it actually accomplish anything.

If there is infinite XP, eventually people have all the things. Even if they are paying 5x the XP cost of other people for those things.

If you want to encourage specialization...XP Cap.

Not XP tax.

XP cap.

When you have infinite xp, eventually everybody who plays for 6+ months is great at 75% of the things.

No, people's characters don't need to keep "growing" sheetwise forever and ever and ever. If you get older and want to learn a new skill? Drop a point from one of your other things.

My unsolicited 2c, the glaring problem with prestige currently is that modelling is effectively the "one true way" to get prestige. And like...glaringly so. Model one time, and you are gaining tenfold the total prestige of even other characters in the top 20.

That has been mitigated, yes, with the cap on modelling gains.

But there is still NOTHING in the game that is going to let you potentially gain 1+ million prestige a week, except...modelling.

Which makes it feel very weird and kind of frustrating?

"Prestige" as a system has become literally nothing but a chart of modelling scores.

Will this change, in the future, as more stuff gets added? I am sure it will.

People will probably be salty until then. And let's be serious, probably after it, too, but hopefully less so.

This is amplified when prestige (AKA do you model or not?) effects SO much other stuff in the game.

If you are an HoH and want to mechanically work on improving your house? Go fucking model.

@kanye-qwest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

make it fun and rewarding without necessarily being as tied to prestige.

What would make hosting events feel more rewarding? What would make you seek out a socially statted char?

???

This seems kind of weird to say?

The pretty obvious answer is...just raise the prestige gain from hosting events to be on par with modelling. Why would other things be less tied to prestige?

Tie it to a social stat/skill that rolls, factored in with the largesse or something.

Like, you guys have set the bar with modelling. Millions of prestige for wearing an outfit is...not really creating RP.

If anything, hosting events should be even more tied to prestige, and more rewarding, I would think.

You can even tie social chars in general to events as a whole. If Joe McSwordman wants to host an event and actually get any significant prestige from it, he needs to talk to a social character and get them to co-host it or endorse it or something.

(I mean, it's not like I'm over here hosting events, I'm not saying this shit for me.)

@jeshin

If by "100s of resources" you mean...250 or so? Sure? Not sure that's very much. It doesn't feel like much. But maybe I'm clueless!

I have clout 23 and fluctuate between 200k-400k prestige generally, and with 5/5 in my work roll, I generate 250-350 resources if I spend all my weekly AP.

Maybe that's more than I realize.

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

It's kind of weird to see pretty much...all of Arx's staff continue with the "oh it's just a fun minigame haha!" thing, when Prestige is tied, in significant ways, to pretty much every manner of generating resources/silver/etc.

The other thing is...it doesn't even make "social characters" valuable or useful.

Being a social character doesn't matter.

The only thing that matters is "did you model this week?" That's not really....a 'social character' thing?

Every other method of gaining prestige is light years behind modelling.

You can be a social character all you want. If you're not modelling, you're not doing anything valuable for your house.

Clout is a ridiculously dominating factor in resource generation.

Who are generating your military resources? The social characters
Who are generating your economic resources? The social characters
Who are generating your social resources? The social characters.

Saying social characters arn't doing anything valuable outside of modeling is a strange thing to say.

As far as I can tell, clout isn't doing a ton for you unless you have the prestige to go with it.

And modelling is the only way to get more than a pittance of prestige. (Invest around 500 resouces for 100k prestige or...go model for millions of prestige? Hm.)

It's kind of weird to see pretty much...all of Arx's staff continue with the "oh it's just a fun minigame haha!" thing, when Prestige is tied, in significant ways, to pretty much every manner of generating resources/silver/etc.

The other thing is...it doesn't even make "social characters" valuable or useful.

Being a social character doesn't matter.

The only thing that matters is "did you model this week?" That's not really....a 'social character' thing?

Every other method of gaining prestige is light years behind modelling.

You can be a social character all you want. If you're not modelling, you're not doing anything valuable for your house.

From my understanding, house income is...pretty insignificant.

Nobles don't get enough "allowance" to do anything with. Wow, I get 4k a week from my house. 16k a RL month. Okay. I guess it's good Arx doesn't use paper money ICly, or I'd probably be wiping my ass with my allowance.

And the houses themselves don't even really make enough to do anything with. Sure, 100k a week or whatever "seems" like a lot. (God forbid you're a smaller house. Oof.) But...with refining and stuff, the base price of materials, etc and that's like nothing. I think I spent somewhere like 300,000 silver when I picked up my character, making 3 pieces of exotic leather things? I could be remembering wrong. And that's not even...the top tier of thing. It's what, the 3rd best leather? 4th?

All the real "income" seems to come through spending AP to do things and how many PCs with the right skills do you have at your beck and call?

Which...seems a little backwards. IDK.

Resources come from the resource farms, duh. All your house's serfs grow them.

@groth said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

I don't think anyone is deliberately keeping things secret.

You're not paranoid enough to be MUing, my friend.

@meg ur nail polish is gauche and your haircut looks like...oh wait, this isn't the hogpit

Uh.

What's the deal with haggle? Are nobles not supposed to do it, or what?

Why does a game like Arx not have more system guides?

Nobody really tells you how to /use/ any of the systems. Sure, they'll tell you "enter this command, and then do this, and you get X". Nobody is telling you 'oh yeah, you need to do x, y, and z, to actually get much out of doing this thing', even though most of the not-new players know that stuff.

I don't know if it's because the game is "competitive" or what, but people seem incredibly inclined towards keeping the 'tricks' they learn about the systems to themselves, and the only way to learn these things as a new player is "just go run face first into the wall 20 times until you figure it out".

Appropriate boundaries?

1. Keep a separation between MSB and actually playing any MUs.

2. Don't give your RL information to people from MUs. I don't care how good they TS'd you.

3. If your spidey sense starts tingling that somebody is being a douchebag and/or creep, you're probably right and should avoid that person.

The 'gamer' in me thinks magic jewelry that boosted stats or a ring of temporary invisibility, etc kind of stuff would be awesome for that more....D&D-esque sort of feel.

But god that'd be a trainwreck.

Every archetype of character would be scrambling to collect the specific set that maximizes what they can do.

Maybe if there was some sort of...'you can only wear one magic artifact, because magic interference' or some shit.

@wizz said in Automated Adventure System:

nipple piercings

Keep your fetishes in the closet, you FREAK!

@kanye-qwest this is a moo