Continuation of Player-Staff meeting - AMA

[Nao]

Someone offered to ask this question but didn't:

Some of us love this game but are busy AF. Have staff considered changing policies or mechanics to make this game viable for very busy people?

Example: most weeks I can only play two hours at most. Improved mechanisms around asynchronous communication or changes to rules around OOC communication may make this game viable for people with playtimes so low.

A lot of things are tied to specific PCs these days. You just need to talk to that guy who plays for an hour a day in the middle of the night, if that. You can go sit in the Gaj all you like and maybe someone will show up, but that doesn't make repeating
> contact amos.templar
> contact aide
every ten minutes any more fun or any less tedious. It just leads to a lot of idling and waiting IG, instead of logging on when you actually have the energy for serious roleplay and doing that.

I know I've gotten extremely frustrated with other PCs in the past when they told me 'oh, I'm just here idling and hoping that leadership guy logs on, please leave me alone and stop trying to interact with me in the meantime'.

Got specific examples?

What I am getting at is many players now have reduced playtimes, but the game can be hard to enjoy if you have reduced playtimes:
- Low playtimes bars you for getting most, if not all roles.
- When you have low playtimes, you are often assumed dead periodically because people have no offline means of getting in touch (besides clan forums).
- When you have low play times, you can feel almost guilty for getting involved in plots, and can lead to a reluctance to play at all.

As a result, many low playtime players effectively give up. This came up in nearly half of the posts in the thread asking old players who no longer play for feedback. It is obviously a blocker for many players who want to play, and keeps them from actually being able to play.

The low playtime problem is also extremely similar to the off peak playtime problem. SO, my question is has staff thought of potential solutions to the low playtime / off peak playtime problem?

Possible solutions I have proposed but please propose your own:
- offline way messages or other async in game messages.
- Better OOC comms than a clunky GDB and a chaotic Discord.
- open more roles suitable to low playtimes.

Looking forward to feedback! Again another player directly said they wanted an answer to my question as well, and this topic was heavily represented in the veteran feedback thread. Inquiring and busy minds want to know.

You've been fairly consistent with bringing this up, so I think most of us have seen your ideas here.

I can only speak for myself on this, but I am less interested in ideas that foster out of game interaction. I am interested in ideas that foster a more rich and rewarding experience IG. I see an implicit assumption that communication and coordination are necessary for that in your ask, but I am not sure that is necessarily the case. The thing that actually struck me and I have been thinking about a lot from the feedback thread was about Once Upon a Time if you were in Allanak, if you wanted to find someone, you went to Trader's or the Gaj, depending on who you wanted to find.  That was it.  Nobles/Templars/GMH Merchants didn't hang out in Estates/Private rooms when they weren't actively doing something, they were in Traders.  Everyone else was in the Gaj.  This may predate some people here, as it was roughly two decades ago. Finding interaction wasn't about coordinating, it was literally about going to a place.

[Mellifera]

I wasn't on Staff when the original formulation of the vision occurred.  I can only speak to where I come from in supporting the continuation of the vision.

My goal is to keep characters playable.  In the case of fully branched main guild sorcerers, truly advanced elementalists and high ranking templars, they could get to a point where they were unplayable. There is no end game for such characters.  Without sufficient challenge, interaction with the rest of the playerbase becomes less meaningful.  It then falls on Staff to represent the proper response from the game world, an inflated sense of that character's importance in the game world to either the player or worse the playerbase, and other pitfalls that happen when a character gets to a certain level of coded power.

Psionicists were much less than ideally playable in other ways.  Some is around how some players react to psionics, and some was around code.  We've taken a crack at code issues.  It then comes to looking at what we have done for sorcerers and elementalists, and make sure there is some parity for psionicists.  Not making them the new thing that is unplayable at the high end.  Not making them substantially more powerful than the sorcerer or templar options.  Making sure that interaction with the rest of the playerbase is still meaningful and challenging.

I think that the player response to psionics is something that we can only control by setting an example and properly informing the playerbase (and perhaps through some more selective messages in game when one is subject to the way) and I'm super happy to see that is being addressed, so thank you!

As others have said, though, many of us dearly miss the epic potential concepts that came from highly specialized non-mundanes. Like Triste said, not all of us want to play those survivable, functional roles, some of us want to play super specialized, devoted roles, devoted roles which have consistently had an amazing, fun impact on the world. Full guild psionicists were the last bastion of that, and they too are now gone. Those past legendary player characters and the huge stories they created for everyone around them have consistently been some of the most memorable, fun parts of Armageddon to many, and I don't think anyone wants that to be relegated to the past alone.

Ultimately I don't personally think it's worth sacrificing those concepts and opportunities in exchange for solving the problem of their broken end-game, and I think others would agree. I hope (and ask) that we could possibly, eventually, seek, explore, and experiment with other solutions to this issue of end-game challenge for full-guilds that doesn't involve killing them off. I'm confident there's a way to have both sub-guilds and full-guilds, repair the issues that come with the end-game for the latter, and ultimately enjoy the best of both worlds. I already have ideas, and perhaps most of them have been thought of already and ruled out, but it's always worth trying.

Thanks again for working so hard at this, I just don't want that part of Armageddon to go away forever.

[Brokkr]

While we appreciate and value your opinion, we have no plans to change direction here.

[Strongheart]

Respectable but compromise is a two-way street.

[Dar]

Ive played a few gicks and I never felt particularly non magickal. I dont think subguild magickers are less of a magicker then full guilds. At least in terms of theme and feel of being a mage.  Though I am in the camp of subguild magicks are too strong anyway.


My point is that its done. We can work on rebalancing individual guilds and aspects.  Hell, sorcs skill trees got updated three times at least. But I doubt we will ever return to full guilds. Its a loss, but not in the type that limits the character concepts that, I think, people would like to play.

Maybe if staff was open to reviewing individual subguilds as being too powerful/weak.  I know when I tried my first drovian I spammed staff with 'WTF this is OP' requests.