Guild Revamp - Sneak Peek

[Hauwke]

Thats basically how I thought it was going to be, thanks for clearing that up.

[John]

In a game where the main classes are used to provide characters with a reasonable set of mundane skills

This wasn't always the case and has only become the case relatively recently.

it does not make any sense to provide players with classes that just contain magick spells + cooking.

Once upon a time classes didn't represent someine's "mundane" skills, but instead represented what they specialise in. In this model, classes that grant a lot of spell's made perfect sense. But I'm not looking to argue whether main guild Magicker's should come back as I don't want to derail this thread. My point was more the finality "this is so, and will never change" (no matter how much feedback we get to the contrary) is disheartening. Especially in a thread that is in part about soliciting feedback from players.

Staff are not considering removing psionicists.

I'm glad to hear it.

Gladiators are separate from the new class system.

will they still exist post-change?

[Nergal]

Yes, gladiators will still exist post-change.

Sorry if what I said was disheartening. Like I said, we want informed feedback from players. The only way to get that is to have tests and have players actually play. That being said, informed feedback on the magick subguilds has thus far suggested that they're a positive change and helped us make additional changes to the magick subguilds - that's why I said that they will remain subguilds. Informed feedback on the new classes will undoubtedly guide us toward making changes to the new classes as players and staff test the classes out.

[Lancer]

I'm thankful that so much interest and effort is being put into refreshing Arm's skill system, and hope it works out beautifully, but I do have to chime in that it is disheartening for me as well.

Primary takeaway for me from the magicker main guild thread and this sneak peek: Main guild magickers were removed because they were too overpowered, so everyone became main guild mundanes. Now main guild mundanes are too powerful, so everyone's going to a specialized class system instead.

I'll avoid any slippery slope fallacies (and I understand the logic of the intent) but that doesn't mean it isn't discouraging.

[Riev]

I'll be interested to see how it affects the actual "need" to have people with different skills. I agree, the few Pickpockets I've had with ANY success, were short lived and required PC (in general) to be injected into a story. Adding to it that you WANT to have a distraction (ie: a room with many people) but the more people in the room, the more likely someone's watch skill will catch you.

Also with burglars, they always WANT to be alone because taking along a warrior as a guard is a hindrance and helps nobody.

I still think, combat wise, specializations are less needed or interesting than to have actual, humanoid opponents for warriors to face that aren't arena-based or gith. But it'll be interesting to have a heavy combat lancer-type twohanding spears dragoon omg wow, but have it still fit the theme.

[Nergal]

@Lancer:
Well, I would say that the main takeaway is not that main guild mundanes currently aren't too powerful. I think that misses half of the problem that the current guilds have.

There is a mixture between strong and weak classes. I would say that ranger and merchant are strong guilds to the point of being overpowered. They can perform their respective skills extremely well, and have a wide range of skills. Merchants can craft almost anything and they have some other skills that allow them to serve as expert spies, healers, riders, and wagon/skimmer pilots. Rangers can fight almost as well as warriors, and are expert marksmen, hunters, foragers, healers, spies, etc. all rolled into one.

Then you have very weak guilds, or guilds that are underwhelming. Pickpockets get a total of 16 skills, not counting the skills everyone gets. Pickpockets pickpocket. That is the only thing they do well, speaking for the coded aspects of play. Burglars are a little better than pickpockets - they can also pick locks! Warriors are good fighters and protectors, but they cannot even scan to look for the elves various dangerous people they're protecting against.

Assassins are fairly middle of the road - they are good at what they do, and they can do a few different things well. But even they are not a good model for the new classes, because they suffer from not starting off already knowledgeable in their supposed expertise.

So I would say that classes, as a whole, need to be made stronger, so that the player's choice of class actually matters. Let's say you want to play a solo hunter/gatherer role. Do you pick Raider (the working name for the heavy combat/wilderness class) so that you start off with high combat skills, but middling to low skills for survival outside the wastes, just so that you don't get killed by the first scrab that sees you? Or do you pick Hunter (the working name for the mixed/wilderness class) for less combat ability but a top-notch ability to sneak up on unsuspecting animals and forage for everything else you need? Or do you pick Scout (the working name for the light combat/wilderness class) for a balance between both of those other choices?

The theory is harder to explain without practice to back it up. That's why I'm confident in the plan to release the classes in a limited manner for testing beforehand, so we can be sure we got it right. A lot of this will make more sense to people when they're giving the classes a test drive, and nothing is permanent until the beta test is over.

[Thunkkin]

This is exciting. We'll see how it turns out--but the guild and skill-up system was feeling increasingly clunky. I personally hope that the new classes have transparent skill trees so that players can accurately envision their character's potential without being tempted to "cheat" and look elsewhere for this info.

[Nergal]

This is exciting. We'll see how it turns out--but the guild and skill-up system was feeling increasingly clunky. I personally hope that the new classes have transparent skill trees so that players can accurately envision their character's potential without being tempted to "cheat" and look elsewhere for this info.

We'll definitely be including skill trees in the helpfiles for the new classes.

[Lancer]

Agreed, Nergal - my reaction didn't mention the underperforming main guilds, as I've felt (and may have posted before, not certain) that Warrior/Assassin should be fleshed out and brought up to Ranger/Merchant standards, with Burglar+Pickpocket merged into a main guild Thief, if the whole system didn't move to a point-buy option. This didn't seem likely, especially without informed input on layouts and playtesting, so it was more of an omission but is still a refreshing discussion.

The potential focus on greater reliance on others when the theme of the game is to corrupt, betray, and murder each other also has me curious (guess it's one way to force more social microplots?), but I'll remain hesitantly hopeful that it just sounds worse at a glance than it is in the nitty gritty. And either way, kudos/thanks for the upfront inclusion of skill trees with the new class system.

[deathkamon]

Agreed, Nergal - my reaction didn't mention the underperforming main guilds, as I've felt (and may have posted before, not certain) that Warrior/Assassin should be fleshed out and brought up to Ranger/Merchant standards, with Burglar+Pickpocket merged into a main guild Thief...

In case the new class change overhaul is faced with mixed reviews, this should be the next viable option. A merging of the Burglar/Pickpocket would allow them to practically be the city equivalents of Rangers. With the addition of more available skills on the Warrior and Assassin, they could also be brought up to those standards as well. The Merchant and Ranger classes could remain with all their skills however, since they're overpowered on their own already.

Codedly, there would be a lot less stress in making that sort of vision come to light, in my standpoint.

[nauta]

I love the sneak peak development model being pursued here.  Not only does it lessen the shock from being blindsided by changes (changes scare people, sudden changes shock people, etc.), but it also generates excitement.  I'm also a big fan of the open development model and Linus's Law: many eyes make all bugs shallow.  (Or whatever it is.)

So on that point, will you be sneak-peaking (or in the technical jargon of the IETF: putting out an RFC [Request for Comments]) on the individual Classes as you move along?  I think it'd be a pretty good idea.  Like I said, you'd both lesson the shock, generate excitement, and maybe even someone might find a problem with a given Class and the skills assigned to it which you hadn't thought about.

[Nergal]

I love the sneak peak development model being pursued here.  Not only does it lessen the shock from being blindsided by changes (changes scare people, sudden changes shock people, etc.), but it also generates excitement.  I'm also a big fan of the open development model and Linus's Law: many eyes make all bugs shallow.  (Or whatever it is.)

So on that point, will you be sneak-peaking (or in the technical jargon of the IETF: putting out an RFC [Request for Comments]) on the individual Classes as you move along?  I think it'd be a pretty good idea.  Like I said, you'd both lesson the shock, generate excitement, and maybe even someone might find a problem with a given Class and the skills assigned to it which you hadn't thought about.

Thanks! We plan on putting out additional updates as things move along, and we'll be getting feedback consistently from beta testers via request tool, as well as spectators to the process on the GDB. We're going to put the most stock in the former type of feedback though, since it is the most helpful and rigorous type. After the beta test is over and the classes are made fully available, we'll still be taking commentary from the playerbase as a whole.

[Riev]

I legit made a warrior because "main guild changes are coming" and I wanted to be placed into like "you're OP warrior? Have this new OP class with relevant skills!".

That character went on to become pretty derned successful.

Is this one of those projects that, despite an announcement, is likely to be 2+ years out? Or is the announcement a "We're probably ready to have this rolling out in 3-6 months"?

One of the hardest things to choke down when it comes to staff and changes, is that even when we KNOW something is coming, it takes -years- before we as players see any changes.

[Nergal]

I don't think that it is years out, but I'm hesitant to stick a timetable on it because I know from experience that anything you expect to take X time will take longer than that. All I can say is that it's one of staff's priorities right now, but also one of many. We're still focused on providing a fun game to players in a lot of different ways.

So let's say that this announcement is just to keep players up-to-date on a work in progress and not associate it with a time. We want to let players know what's coming but we don't want players to stop playing and just wait in anticipation of the new classes, because there is still a long process to go through, especially with the limited beta.

[Molten Heart]

So let's get to the white elephant in the room. I think this is already been touched on but let's address it directly.

Rangers....

Rangers are by far my favorite class. I enjoy the utility and the independence the guild offers, allowing me to play with others but not being dependent on anyone to enjoy my play. Will there be a new class or classes that offer a similar independence and utility to the ranger guild? I'm just sad that I'm going to have to say goodbye to the ranger guild and I'm hoping there's something that's going to fill the role the ranger guild currently occupies.

Okay, I've got to go roll up a new ranger character and enjoy one last dash!

[Riev]

This seems accurate.

[Nergal]

Let's say you want to play a solo hunter/gatherer role. Do you pick Raider (the working name for the heavy combat/wilderness class) so that you start off with high combat skills, but middling to low skills for survival outside the wastes, just so that you don't get killed by the first scrab that sees you? Or do you pick Hunter (the working name for the mixed/wilderness class) for less combat ability but a top-notch ability to sneak up on unsuspecting animals and forage for everything else you need? Or do you pick Scout (the working name for the light combat/wilderness class) for a balance between both of those other choices?

So yes, I think the ranger experience will be unharmed. I'll try to think of a good way to explain the current guilds in comparison to the new proposed classes.

[palomar]

Looking forward to this!

[BadSkeelz]

I suppose a better way to say the sentence you bolded would be "We wanted to create classes in such a way that no one class can do everything masterfully by itself, like the ranger and merchant classes would." These classes are going to be able to do other things, but primarily they're going to be able to do a few things particularly well. For combat classes, this is coombat. For mercantile classes, this is crafting and bartering. For mixed classes, this is the skills in the survival group.

The generalist classes are the mixed and light classes, and are strong in their own ways.

We are still going to use the existing subguilds, and they are very well suited to combining with these classes to form a "complete" character.

Thank you for the response. It does sound better rephrased like that, although I would still rather have more people being able to do more things well. Being locked in to roles from character generation is probably the most irksome thing about the current guild-skill system for me.

I don't know how you're planning to deal with skill caps, but has any thought been given to making it potentially beneficial to double-up on skills with class and subclass choices? For example, let's say the Generalist or Light wilderness classes have a lot of skills that cap at advanced. If such a class selected "Outdoorsman" as their subclass, the shared skills (capped at advanced in both) would have their cap raised to Master.

 Basically this would allow a the character's skill caps to become greater than the sum of their parts. It would let people who really want to be master in more than one area a means to do so, at the cost of restricting their skillset. Similar to how Ranger and Protector now complement each other: you're at warrior level survival (At least when mounted) with all the inherent ranger survival goodies, but you're sacrificing the craft, trade, or stealth skills another subguild choice could have brought you.

The ranger/prot example works because it either gives you higher skill caps or circumvents a long grind by giving you a useful skill immediately. Other subguild choices, like Thug on a Warrior, do not give the same sort of benefit.

[Riev]

I had been thinking of that similarly to Skeelz.

Heavy Outdoor Combat has a small set of skills that all hit master, with no real utility.
Light Outdoor Combat has a rather large set of skills like skinning and foraging, but it caps at like Jman.

If you pick a subguild that compliments, it raises the skill to a certain point. The balance issue would be choosing city based combat warrior, and a subguild that compliments, making you into a walking ballista, but even then that'd be fine. Good luck finding someone to fight outside of a Gladiator.

[Delirium]

(journeyman skillcaps make the skill barely worth having)

.02

[Melkor]

(journeyman skillcaps make the skill barely worth having)

Agreed.

[Armaddict]

(journeyman skillcaps make the skill barely worth having)

.02

Depends.

Journeyman parry is vastly and by far superior to no parry.

[Melkor]

Good point. Then perhaps that statement only applies to active skills.

[Nergal]

(journeyman skillcaps make the skill barely worth having)

.02

I can say that the current draft of the skill trees for the new classes puts all skills at a skill level you'd find usable, at the least.