I hate magickers, official thread.

[flurry]

Right.  But another point that several people in this thread made is that, against the grain of the documentation, it now saturates the game.  The magickers playing now, not all of them (all it takes is a couple bad apples...), make no effort to conceal the mystery of magick.  I know for a fact that one fellow I rp around is a new player and he was mentioning xx magicker casting xx like it was nobody's business.  This is a serious problem.  Part of the wonder I had with my first few days of arm is that I had no knowledge of magick.  Little displays of it would literally leave me feeling red-ass nekked and abused.  Armageddon's characteristically wonderful -depth- is in jeopardy here.  No longer am I suprised by the tricks the game can toss at me.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this is a problem.  People speak about magick details far more freely on the GDB than they used to, and it makes me want to avoid all threads dealing with magick.  I don't know where it went off track or why, but now people will freely post of the capabilities of the different classes.

It wasn't that long ago when discussion of skill tree progression, particularly for magickers, was not allowed.  Now we at least one player creating a character with no intention to roleplay, but rather to spam-cast in an effort to gain IC info about magickers, and then post the results on the GDB.  This is okay?

Someone posted on another thread about hoping players will keep the new sorcery details secret in Armageddon 2.   I wanted to laugh.  Not because I disagree; I couldn't agree more.  I've just seen so little restraint shown about keeping secret info off the GDB.

It used to be that common knowledge of magick was determined by the public documentation, not by whoever were the most ineffective secret-keepers with karma.  I miss those days.

edit to add:  For one of many examples, see the post above.

[spawnloser]

That's my point exactly. The documentatation is already out the window. And I'm not happy about it.

You're wrong, because you're ignoring the thousands upon thousands of VNPCs and NPCs that aren't magickers.

[Ghost]

Of course it is possible.  Does that mean you should do it?  No.  It's possible so that you can cast a few spells and then STOP CASTING AND DO OTHER STUFF without feeling like you're a pussy that will never be able to survive on his/her own.

I am fine with the idea that assassins should be able to branch parry (which is in the helpfile) in one day and max backstab and sneak/hide under two days of playtime.

Of course, it does not mean people should do it.  Just let's make that possible.  What do you say?

Another two more, I can name for avoiding danger again right out of the box.

Avoiding danger straight away? No magicker can just avoid all danger without branching.

I was actually replying to this like in two sentence...  But then I realized my original post was quite clear and the way it was meant to.  I am not even going to explain myself one more time, anyone can go and reread it.

[Lizzie]

It looks like the last "update" on magickers in all of the web pages was in 2003. I have to assume they're updates, since the game's been around for a lot longer than that and has had magickers in it longer than that.

So, the documentation on magickers, our "appropriate" perceptions of their existence, and the technical stuff about them (such as how to cast a spell) was last updated 4 years ago. Armageddon is an evolving game, its plotlines constantly changing. Four real-life years is a very long time, for a world such as Zalanthas.

What if people forced themselves to step out of the box of the old documentation, and saw things from a different perspective?

We already know the world (as we know it) is going to end. There's little point now, in updating 4-year-old docs, when those docs will be completely obsolete in around 6 months. So, why not look at it something like this:

Magickers have always been the big threat, and never moreso than now. The world's mundane populace are nervously wondering where all these magickers have come from - has Tektolnes begun amassing a new army, unbenownst even to His Templars? Does Muk Utep secretly harness magickal powers forceful enough to bestow lesser powers on people he has chosen, at birth, who don't even realize they exist to become his minions? Is the Sandlord gathering the elements and sending them out upon random grebbers, in some maniacal attempt at creating a new Age of Chaos?

Or even more scary - has the planet itself begun to churn with its own destructive forces, and the way of life for every city-bound person, every tribe, every elf, even the silt horrors - now at risk of complete and utter anihlation?

Rather than bitch about it here on the GDB (which you all have a right to do of course, but it doesn't seem very productive), why not roleplay it out? Why not roleplay however your character would feel, in a world that has disdained magicks since before your character was born, but has suddenly been spawning magicks all over the place as though the very desert sands has spewed them forth?

Would your character be afraid? Happy? Indifferent? Curious? Why not turn this influx of magickers into a plotline? Or - maybe it already is, and the staff just don't want to tell anyone. Maybe it's an intentional part of the "end of the world plotline," to let in so many more magicker applications than ever before. And of course they can't confirm that here cause it would spoil the surprise.

I don't know what the real deal is on this issue, the reasoning behind all these magickers being around. I don't think any of us knows for sure, we can suppose and assume, but I think it's just SO much more fun to accept that there are a lot more than previously, and RP out the reaction to it.

L. Stanson

[Tarx]

Heh.  I like Lizzie's idea.

[Marauder Moe]

You know, if an increase in magick preceding the next cataclysm is something meant to be ICly happening, the immortals might not ever come here and acknowledge it.  Something to think about.

[Malken]

This "End of the World" excuse is getting ridiculous for me, it's just pure speculation at this point.

The game is just losing its appeal for me right now, and you are right, it's just bitching at this point and the admins are letting us go through 50+ pages of tossing around numbers and IC information without telling us much of what's going on and if it's as it should be or if there's really a problem or not.. (Except for a couple of admins who first told us that things were as it should be but a few pages back are now telling us that indeed there might be a problem with the numbers of non-mundane characters we see in the game lately).

So at this point I think it's better for me to just take a step back and come back in a few months for, hopefully, the real end of time RPTs and see how things are with the new Arm 2.0

Peace out!

[Ghost]

Magickers have always been the big threat, and never moreso than now. The world's mundane populace are nervously wondering where all these magickers have come from - has Tektolnes begun amassing a new army, unbenownst even to His Templars? Does Muk Utep secretly harness magickal powers forceful enough to bestow lesser powers on people he has chosen, at birth, who don't even realize they exist to become his minions? Is the Sandlord gathering the elements and sending them out upon random grebbers, in some maniacal attempt at creating a new Age of Chaos?

No.  The concentration of the magickers in the world did not change.  Or we would see a staff note in one of these threads like "The number of magick encounters on PC to PC level is purely IC, please RP it accordingly" if it was a change in the entire world.  If it was really something that we should consider as an IC happening, and if the staff did not tell us, that would be a really great joke on all playerbase.  Except it would not really be funny.  Why would staff want to mislead us in something that affect the entire world in the first place?

Rather than bitch about it here on the GDB (which you all have a right to do of course, but it doesn't seem very productive), why not roleplay it out? Why not roleplay however your character would feel, in a world that has disdained magicks since before your character was born, but has suddenly been spawning magicks all over the place as though the very desert sands has spewed them forth?

Considering there are approximately 500000 people in Allanak, lets say 1000 is gemmed.  That would probably be the approximate ratio of magicker/mundane in the entire world:  About 1/500 I am guessing.  Throw out the really burden-to-play roles (such as slaves) that will probably leave 150000 playable characters in Allanak.  The ratio is now 1/150, which is still optional.  Multiply it with people's enjoying certain roles and necessary special applications (nobles to drive plots, templars to enforce laws...etc) I will multiply that ratio with 10 (which I believe is more than generous) so that will leave an approximate ratio of 1/15.  And  that would be a reasonable ratio, at least for me to play along.

Now that is more or less the expected ratio that I would expect to encounter in any region of the known world.  If I am now becoming magick-friendly just because majority of people I can interact (PCs) are magickers and most of everything else is just mindless zombies (vNPCs and NPCs) and if I am being magicker friendly for the sake of that then it is bad RP in all levels.  It is not even true there are that many magickers, it is just they are so visible!  And they are the only ones I can befriend/love/hate/oppose/compete/fight/work with/work for so what the hell?  The best RP option here is to just quit the character so he can actually RP appropriately with the appropriate vNPCs, instead of going around lame excuses to interact with the playerbase.

P.S:  I can just see someone taking one sentence out of this post and saying "Oh you should consider vNPCs it is how I RP it is how you should RP bla bla.."
Don't.  Just don't.  I know there are vNPCs and we RP accordingly, but they don't greet me back when I say hello or they don't fight back when I beat them, they don't sell me a piece of armor, I can't count them as one of my contacts to supply spice, and I definitely do not get killed by one of them.  So don't derail mindlessly.

[LoD]

Don't attack Hymwen because she's been forced to these extremes.

Who forced her?

My guess is the people on the GDB that swore up and down that magickers were not capable of becoming powerful as quickly as Hymwen, Ghost, and a few others had claimed.  Go back through the threads and you'll see this arguement come up over and over where players deny the fact that it is possible for a magicker to grow powerful enough to handle most mundane threats in a very short period of time.

When people don't like what they're hearing,denial is one of the first most obvious reactions.  Well, we're not sitting face-to-face where we could privately convey our experiences, so Hymwen took another solution to help demonstrate to the vocal posters (and silent readers) what is possible.  And simply because magickers are a karma class doesn't mean that several players haven't progressed through their spell trees extremely quickly -- especially those playing their second, third, or fourth magickal character in a row.

You're wrong, because you're ignoring the thousands upon thousands of VNPCs and NPCs that aren't magickers.

She isn't wrong.  Especially not because you say so.  The documentation is there to provide us with a guideline of how our general concepts of the world should be determined.  There's no qualifier in the documentation that states players or player characters are exempt from following the documentation, which relates mostly or solely to the virtual populace.

I've always taken the documentation as a measure of how the entire gameworld should feel.  If magick is a rare and mysterious component of Zalanthas, then it should be rare and mysterious to the player, non-player, and virtual characters in the game.  You cannot bypass this with some convenient excuse that all player characters are "special" characters and, therefore, are excused from both following the documentation and expecting the documentation to be followed.

The problem is that the "available" roles span an extremely large cross section of the global food chain.  You could have five people create new characters and enter the world as a 'rinth beggar, a Byn mercenary, a a Kuraci hunter, an Allanaki templar, and a rogue sorcerer.  The difference between those roles is -massive- and the issue is that some of the lower end people are being trampled by a growing quantity of the upper tier.  And by trampled, I mean their gameplay, which probably shouldn't contain an ounce of magickal interaction, now contains magickal elements.  Not only once, but frequently.

As Halaster mentioned, the "teeth" given to magickers were designed with the notion that magickers, as a group of players, would be few and far between.  Once that number began to grow, its presence was more prominently felt by the players of lower tier characters because of the disparity in power.

The problem isn't with the model for magickal spell progression.

The problem isn't with the power potential of the magicker class.

The problem is with both the total number and distribution of the magickers in game as they relate to the rest of the playerbase.

The playerbase isn't large enough to entertain a gameworld with lower, middle, and upper echelons of power while remaining independant of one another.  The culture and the lack of players creates a frequent and often unwanted meeting of magickal/mundane that probably shouldn't happen, but does because there aren't enough other options.

Mundane leaders get approached (aggressively or passively) by magickal entities because magicker players, like mundane players, want to use the abilities they have practiced to "do something".  Guards practice so they can guard.  Merchants practice so they can make money.  Thieves practice so they can steal.  Magickers practice so they can use magick.  Use it for what?  Most of the plots in the gameworld involve mundane players because it simply follows the demographics, but the power of the magickers can be so awesome that it completely trumps the mundane's involvement.

The entire northern region makes it nearly impossible for magickers to use their powers in mundane plots in a positive way, so it constantly is introduced in an aggressive, overbearing, or sometimes fatal way that leaves the mundanes feeling frustrated.  Those are the kind of problems that result from having a culture that forces a "us vs. them" mentality of magicker vs. mundane, but doesn't appropriately limit the number of magickers to keep a sense of balance between the two forces.  And once that balance is lost, the game becomes less and less attractive to your average mundane player.

Let's say that you played pick-up basketball every week with the neighborhood kids.  Every once and awhile, a professional basketball player would show up.  It'd be fun because there'd be an army of low ability players and this professional that can do amazing things.  However, now each week the number of professional quality players grows to the point that some of the pick-up players feel left out and trampled.  They aren't guarding pick-up players, they're guarding professionals.  The professionals start taking over their game and before you know it, the original players are kind of wishing that they could just go back to playing simple pick-up basketball without the professionals always showing up.

And, if it doesn't change, eventually those pick-up players are going to look for another court to play on.

You shouldn't interpret that feeling as "hatred" for magickers or a desire to see the option to play magickers being challenged, but a plea from several players that a game they really enjoyed has been changing in a way that lessens both the fun they glean from each session, and the desire to participate.

As Belenos said, there's no easy answer.  Hopefully we can address some of these issues and provide fun for both groups in Arm 2.

-LoD

[Sanvean]

Hey guys. Too much edging towards flame-land, along with bits of IC-senstive info, and assertions made based on random facts taken out of context makes me think that letting LoD have the last word is a fine idea.

Please be sensitive to the fact that we don't want a lot of discussion of the magic system on here.  A great many people want to find things out IC, and not on the boards.

If you have assertions or commentary that you feel absolutely shoudl be considered in the next version of the game, feel free to email it to me and I will compile it into the new game wiki for other staff to read and contemplate.

(later edit)

I have edited out some info from this thread, but have not gone through post by post because it's frickin' 24 pages long. To be clear on this, you should not be posting skill or game mechanic information on this board.  It is one easy way to get yourself banned.  Do not do it.  If you see someone doing something that distresses you on the boards, it is significantly more effective to mail a board admin than to start spewing flames.