Recent Poison Updates Questions

[Inks]

Maaaate. Stamina regen nonsense was a bug, now fixed. Ay.

Grishen still does but it is what it always do.

[Dracul]

Does having stamina regen with bloodburn mean sleeping while poisoned with bloodburn is no longer an immediate (if drawn out) death sentence?

[Halaster]

Does having stamina regen with bloodburn mean sleeping while poisoned with bloodburn is no longer an immediate (if drawn out) death sentence?

I'm not quite following on that one.  I don't see what you mean by sleeping with bloodburn when it blocked stamina regen being a death sentence.

[Dracul]

Does having stamina regen with bloodburn mean sleeping while poisoned with bloodburn is no longer an immediate (if drawn out) death sentence?

I'm not quite following on that one.  I don't see what you mean by sleeping with bloodburn when it blocked stamina regen being a death sentence.

While it may not have 100% guaranteed a death, if you aren't at full enough stamina to wake up, if you go to sleep and can't regain stamina, you can't wake up. If you chose to attempt to sleep you would then be locked into that choice.

I've lost more than a couple characters by going to sleep after being bloodburn poisoned...first time I thought "maybe they can sleep it off better".

[Halaster]

Does having stamina regen with bloodburn mean sleeping while poisoned with bloodburn is no longer an immediate (if drawn out) death sentence?

I'm not quite following on that one.  I don't see what you mean by sleeping with bloodburn when it blocked stamina regen being a death sentence.

While it may not have 100% guaranteed a death, if you aren't at full enough stamina to wake up, if you go to sleep and can't regain stamina, you can't wake up. If you chose to attempt to sleep you would then be locked into that choice.

I've lost more than a couple characters by going to sleep after being bloodburn poisoned...first time I thought "maybe they can sleep it off better".

Ahah, OK I follow you now.  Then yeah, this change would save you from that scenario as Bloodburn no longer prevents stamina drain.

[BadSkeelz]

I think recent change in cures hasn't been a good experience with the playerbase.

They never should have gotten rid of "red cures cure blood burn, green cures terradin," etc in my opinion. It's just another confusing skill gap that benefits veterans, those with access to spreadsheets, and a very small number of subguilds.

[dumbstruck]

I think recent change in cures hasn't been a good experience with the playerbase.

They never should have gotten rid of "red cures cure blood burn, green cures terradin," etc in my opinion. It's just another confusing skill gap that benefits veterans, those with access to spreadsheets, and a very small number of subguilds.

Same. That was a very easy system that anyone could learn in 10 minutes or less and didn't require endless testing. Testing which, now, is much riskier than ever, as far as I can tell. I could be proved wrong, but I won't be, because that's a system I absolutely refuse to engage with now. There are enough stupidly risky things that could kill a character unintentionally without me looking for them actively. There have been many changes I have really liked (like the change from the old 6 guild system to the new class system, big fan), but this is one I absolutely cannot stand and has ruined an entire area of the game for me.

There were 3 main tablets (all of them sold by npcs), that cured 3 main common poisons, and basically everyone knew what they were, and that was equity. If you wanted your poison to be scary you had to find an exotic poison and take a risk doing it, same as now, but if you were using common poisons, you had to expect people might have common cures. That's just one more area that newbies are hugely disadvantaged because of 'find out IC' when... I mean, if you're able to access brew and poisoning so commonly, at least have the 3 most common ones (red, yellow and green, as they were), be common knowledge and relatively easily available. The stuff beyond that was still pretty obscure. I didn't know it, and just knowing those three things made the game fairly survivable as far as dealing with the poisons from common wildlife, which is all you really needed to know that for.  But that's a whole ass rant from me.

[FantasyWriter]

I think recent change in cures hasn't been a good experience with the playerbase.

They never should have gotten rid of "red cures cure blood burn, green cures terradin," etc in my opinion. It's just another confusing skill gap that benefits veterans, those with access to spreadsheets, and a very small number of subguilds.

I agree, particularly when something is happening in high-stress situations in game, and you are panicking IRL, trying to remember which pocket this is in and which ones you put in your quiver.

[mansa]

I think recent change in cures hasn't been a good experience with the playerbase.

They never should have gotten rid of "red cures cure blood burn, green cures terradin," etc in my opinion. It's just another confusing skill gap that benefits veterans, those with access to spreadsheets, and a very small number of subguilds.

I agree, particularly when something is happening in high-stress situations in game, and you are panicking IRL, trying to remember which pocket this is in and which ones you put in your quiver.

The cures being different colors has been in the game since January 2017, so about 5 years. (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,52152.0.html)

You can purchase different vials that have different keywords on them.
example: "kzul", "scorpion", "hexagonal", "triangular", etc
You can also purchase a pill-press item, which will append a keyword to the front of pills.
example: "square", "triangular", "oval", etc
You can also make the pills specific colors, based on the original herbs you use.
"blue", "pink", "red", "yellow", etc.

Trying to find the right keyword for the right pill isn't the recent change I'm expressing.  The recent change is that pills are not immediately effective, and they have a "protection buff" that lasts a while, to pre-emptively protect against poisoning.

[Pariah]

The thing that confuses me about poisons in particular is they don't work the same as cures.

So with a cure, I can get a tablet or vial and assess or taste it to get the it tastes like pink and blue.

But with poisons that doesn't work, so how is one to discover what flavors poison is?

[Brokkr]

You have to get the flavors from the intermediary crafting step, not the actual poison paste.

[Pariah]

You have to get the flavors from the intermediary crafting step, not the actual poison paste.

What does that mean?  The natural occurrence of poisons in the world doesn't have an intermediary step.

If it's a brewed poison, how are you supposed to learn the brew, without being able to analyze a natural one?

[BadSkeelz]

I think recent change in cures hasn't been a good experience with the playerbase.

They never should have gotten rid of "red cures cure blood burn, green cures terradin," etc in my opinion. It's just another confusing skill gap that benefits veterans, those with access to spreadsheets, and a very small number of subguilds.

I agree, particularly when something is happening in high-stress situations in game, and you are panicking IRL, trying to remember which pocket this is in and which ones you put in your quiver.

The cures being different colors has been in the game since January 2017, so about 5 years. (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,52152.0.html)

I know, and I still hate it. It's a bad change, as is the one towards bandages that makes anything but the highest end ones useful for regenerating health below your normal cap. Has lead to way more gaminess than a relatively naturalistic system before.

[dumbstruck]

I think recent change in cures hasn't been a good experience with the playerbase.

They never should have gotten rid of "red cures cure blood burn, green cures terradin," etc in my opinion. It's just another confusing skill gap that benefits veterans, those with access to spreadsheets, and a very small number of subguilds.

I agree, particularly when something is happening in high-stress situations in game, and you are panicking IRL, trying to remember which pocket this is in and which ones you put in your quiver.

The cures being different colors has been in the game since January 2017, so about 5 years. (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,52152.0.html)

I know, and I still hate it. It's a bad change, as is the one towards bandages that makes anything but the highest end ones useful for regenerating health below your normal cap. Has lead to way more gaminess than a relatively naturalistic system before.

I haven't messed with bandages much but agree about the tablets. Just one more thing that would have been really easy for newbies to grasp but now gets added to the list of 'find out IC' stuff (not everyone likes to turn everything into a puzzle, I don't) which puts people willing to engage with a needlessly arcane system at an advantage over those who don't have a set of spreadsheets or knowledge from having created the system. There were still exotic poisons before, and plenty of them. But the ones that belonged to all the wildlife that is everywhere had easy, easy to attain and remember and identify, fairly reliable cures, and that aided the game with what they call playability.

[Pariah]

So Armageddon in general, even before this change was essentially ruled by OOC information.

I know that's gonna get me some flak saying that but it is what it is.

Examples of this are rife in the game.

One that -most- plants are static, which I think I saw in a news update they are changing so hopefully they do for all of them.  So having static plants isn't really an issue if they are easily discoverable by people, but the way the game is designed they are not.  So you can literally walk past the plant o poison or cures every day for years and never know it because you didn't decide to do a grid by grid search.  However, after that long you can see the critters hiding three grids away with scan, but not the dead body or the plant that's been there for years.

Now this isn't just a gripe against game design, it also points towards my point of ooc knowledge.  If someone was showed ten years ago that plant A is in this very random out of the way gridsquare that nobody ever visits except to get plant A, then the only way that people know of it is one of two ways.  They were told, either IC or OOC by searching the other board.

So if they were told IC, that's better than OOC right?  Well when you drill down and think about it, yes and no.  Let me explain.  I'm Pariah and I know from ten years ago that plant a is there, I play mostly hunters so that info somehow trickles down through every single hunter to reach my dude, is that sorta cheating cause I'm keeping ooc knowledge?

But in my experience things like that tend to be handwaved as, "He found out through an NPC." or some other such bullshit right?

But what is the ultimate problem?  That a new player without years of experience doesn't have the benefit of that prior ooc knowledge, using purely the game systems outside of begging everyone they know where plant a is, they can't find out unless they literally do a grid search of the map, e e e n w w w n e e e n w w w and so on. So are there people out there that will do that and get their excel spreadsheets or graph paper out and do that?  (Sure there already are a few outdated ass maps out there just from that) but is it fair to the newbie stalker/scout who wants to explore?  Nope.


Same goes for poison and cure lists, they exist in the wild, but not officially by the game and if you want to find out in game it's so hard because of the above statement of not seeing the tree of flowers you ride within one block of daily, just because you didn't want to become Dora the explorer and map each grid square.  But I can see a hidden snake from a football field away.

So until they somehow implement plants growing sporadically and not in static (at least all of them) locations, and poison and cure have a way to discover them that isn't pester every character you meet to tell you flavors or rely on the very custodians of ooc knowledge that have kept it since god knows when, these systems will always be dominated by -those in the know- by simple ooc knowledge.



Edit: It's also weird that certain stabbing weapons can't be poisoned.  I never understood that.  If it's stabby, it should be poisonable.

[dumbstruck]

The exotic shit always was, the less exotic shit, you used to have red, yellow, and green cures sold on npcs who'd tell you what made what, all of which were craftable via dyes with the proper tints which cured the three main poisons you'd come across via npcs in the wild, and joining the byn or visiting the npc herbalist would both readily offer you all the knowledge you needed to access these cures (even if it was via buying them in the shop or buying the ingredients and making them, which you could tell the dye colors by analyze on a bought tablet). Again, the exotic stuff like loosetongue and perraine would send you chasing a pc for information, but stuff like bloodburn and skellebain was easy as hell to cure, so you weren't really inconvenienced constantly and terribly by the wildlife around you. Yes, it made it more difficult for basic pcs to poison you with stuff that was common and have it take. But you could also have viable hunter pcs without shelling out more for cures than water as it sounds like is easily a possibility with the new system. And in a desert world that seems unreasonable as a metric. But that's just me.

[BadSkeelz]

This new system is way more governed by metaknowledge than the old one, as cures are now impenetrably complicated for anyone without brewing (or a spreadsheet to sniff out what does what). I'm glad that acquiring poison isn't as static and prone to meta abuse as it was, but there's been a huge knock on playability for the other 80% of the playerbase who's on the receiving end of that shit.

[Brokkr]

I think it is good to remember that a lot of the earlier muds has a lot of content based on puzzles and that some people like figuring stuff out like this.  If may not be your cup of tea, but there needs to be a mix of both content types and challenges.

[Pariah]

I think it is good to remember that a lot of the earlier muds has a lot of content based on puzzles and that some people like figuring stuff out like this.  If may not be your cup of tea, but there needs to be a mix of both content types and challenges.

This is so hard to discuss without giving away things...

I'm all for puzzles and challenges that are surmountable by trial and error or logic.

But even if I take and combine two different herbs over and over till I find something that doesn't taste like ash, I have no idea what it cures or what poison I've created.

It's sorta a chicken or the egg scenario.  Yeah I can analyze or taste a pill or vial, but there has to be a vial to taste first.

So if you can't find a skelebain cure, you can't logically figure out what the cure is without some type of outward info.

Maybe if all the weaker cures were sold by NPCs we could just go buy one and reverse engineer it, but they aren't at least not in my part of the world.

Also, slight critique in line with the weirdness of Foraging, how some rocks are named and others aren't.

Why does poison just have colors instead of the assess prompt, on a person with the poisoning skill, not just say, this is bloodburn, this is skelebain?  Why the goofy colors?

When you type craft branch and turn it into a club, it's assumed the leather wrapping on the base of the club for a handle is just essential knowledge you've picked up with making the craft.

A sharpened stone into a sword, same deal with the hilt or leather wrapping.  So knowledge is assumed in the crafting system that you just know certain things, but for some reason, when it comes to poison, it's treated like it's Voldamort in Harry Potter.

[Halcyon]

I think the current poison/cure system would be fine without the current theft code or the current rot code.  With either combination, its a little much.

There are some side effects that will occur from making it harder to travel between places.   I suspect we are vaguebooking about second order effects like these.

[Filthy_Grey_Rat]

Fine, I'm just going to tell you.

You can, especially with a buddy, force people or mobs like rats, to get poisoned, then apply a variety of cures until you see symptoms change. (said with humour)

I always felt 'learning all the cures' was a Noble's goal, where as buying recipes, stealing them, tribes carrying the knowledge over, that would be the norm among commoners and non city based tribal chars. Then again, that won't stop me from trying, and I do agree that it'll likely take me to the end of Armageddon to actually get all that knowledge.

[Bloodpaint]

I really can't stand that some people complain and complain and basically demand to be told what to do until some innocent person tells exactly what to do, it seems abusive. I don't think we should cave in to this kind of foot-stomping.

Can confirm absolutely that this does not give any advantage to "veterans" whatsoever, seeing as I am not, and looking at the people who are complaining.



And can confirm that the poison changes have trivialized poison so much that it is now useless in most real situations, while much more powerful instant combat commands have not been affected at all. We should be instead looking at why it is it acceptable for these commands to exist still, when useful poison is not. All it does is penalize people who would prefer to play one type of character over another, but that option is now removed if they want to be useful in 1v1 situations, which is what nearly everything usually is. It seems like it was some extremely short-sighted changes that should not have been done without looking at balance of other options.

Why should one be made useless in real situations, but not the others? If a combat command can't be "cured", why should a poison that has had a LOT more work put into it be able to be so trivially removed? Why should everything be easy?

This is made worse that some characters can even accidentally kill just by typing it even without any extra commands, balance is so out there that it's just ridiculously in favor of certain types of characters now.

If someone can just eat the most basic of cures to live through the most complex poisons, why bother with any of it when magick or someone with high melee combat already are more likely to actually kill [instantly]] than give a little TICKLE and eat a 60 coin tablet? I don't know game statistics but from what I have seen magick and combat are way way way more what causes people to die, and magick is just "new game+ mode" rather than having any disadvantages, at the moment, especially since they can have both now.

Lets have a new era of interaction between characters and remove all vending machines for cures and poisons (and make all NPC created stuff inert) since they are usually used in interaction with other characters - it's not needed at all, there's always SO many characters that are willing to help, even through friends of friends - it shouldn't be possible to get any of this stuff without characters actually taking risks or roleplaying with other characters.

Also lets have some IC laws regulating who is allowed access to cures, and that they have to be screened by Templars before being allowed - create a black market Bearing in mind that none of these are things that the average citizens that don't leave the walls should be experiencing, and the more expensive they are, the more the opinion would be... Why should this random person be allowed cures for the exotic poisons that their "betters" use to get rid of people that are problems to them? "If we allow this person that never leaves the walls to have bloodburn cures, we might need to actually waste something expensive later on this person that doesn't currently have much value to our totalitarian government right now?" I think a lot of interesting plots would probably get started off by them becoming something people envy each other for. Or wondering why mister normal grey cloak has templar-rated exotics.

[GreenTransient]

I think it is good to remember that a lot of the earlier muds has a lot of content based on puzzles and that some people like figuring stuff out like this.  If may not be your cup of tea, but there needs to be a mix of both content types and challenges.

I think it's good to remember, that not everyone has all of the game knowledge and massive years dumped into having FO everything IC already, or a team of people who also know everything at their disposal, and instead have to just deal with the end of the stick that is forced on them.  So maybe, some of us would love to have a lot less "puzzles" and "figuring stuff out" when the average expectant result of learning (very little if anything valuable) is PC death.

[Bloodpaint]

I think it is good to remember that a lot of the earlier muds has a lot of content based on puzzles and that some people like figuring stuff out like this.  If may not be your cup of tea, but there needs to be a mix of both content types and challenges.

I think it's good to remember, that not everyone has all of the game knowledge and massive years dumped into having FO everything IC already, or a team of people who also know everything at their disposal, and instead have to just deal with the end of the stick that is forced on them.  So maybe, some of us would love to have a lot less "puzzles" and "figuring stuff out" when the average expectant result of learning (very little if anything valuable) is PC death.

Can confirm absolutely that this does not give any advantage to "veterans" whatsoever, seeing as I am not, and looking at the people who are complaining.

Why should you get special treatment when everyone gets the same stick and has the same chance to explore what the stick does, in different ways? My first character figured out most of it through RP with other characters - without having much reliable advice on hand.

If we are truly AGAINST meta-information (a lot of this stuff sounds like people angry that their old info isn't useful anymore), if we really truly want to level the playing field, it would be better if everything changed every 1 RL year, randomly.

[geminferno]

Can we please take a step back a moment and keep in mind that there are people behind the screens. Make sure your choice of words aren't too accusatory or can be misinterpreted into something offensive.