Descent into Hack & Slash?

[Miradus]

There are, like, three people online when I play, and five of those people are not gonna like me very much. 'The whole crew' is maybe me and one other guy and I absolutely hate how much has been gated around playing at 3 am over the years.

I concede that is an issue, but I don't know what the solution for off-peakers is.

As a former off-peaker.

[Patuk]

We could stop designing systems that punish offpeak play. That'd be nice.

[Pariah]

We could stop designing systems that punish offpeak play. That'd be nice.

Is this a reference to poisons losing their power?

[FantasyWriter]

Any change requiring multiple PCs to do something we are use to being able to do ourselves.

While I am not normally an off-peaker, I DO often play solo roles and enjoy such RP.

[Halaster]

It doesn't have to take multiple PC's to get poisons/cures.  What's different now is that you have to specialize in order to "be the best" in terms of poison/cure.  And there are two classes than can do both brew and poisoning (Stalker and Miscreant).

[lostinspace]

I'm not an offpeak player, but occasionally try and play solo desert skyrim.
Not identical to off-peak play, but I assume I run into a couple of the same issues.

My preferred class is raider, it doesn't get skinning. Gathering from hunting is nearly pointless for that character, need to bring along someone else. If there's nobody else, sucks to suck.
For reference even the old guild Warrior got like high apprentice skinning. Also if you don't have a skill, items that provide +skill don't work, so there's nothing you can really do about it.

Brew changes mean finding cures on dead bodies is nearly pointless, no idea what poison that tablet actually works on. Or it could actually be a poison pill.
Even if you do put together a set of cures, you got a finite amount of time to use them before they turn to dust. Hopefully the person who made you the first set is still alive,
otherwise offpeak player will need to log in at 4am to find the only brewer in the area. Hopefully they get them the first time, or they'll need to try again the next day.

Poison changes don't effect me much, was never very interested in poisoning. But needing a second character with brew to make your potent poisons would really suck.
Especially if you're one of five people online, and none of the others even have brew.

Combat changes that made fighting things with lower off/def than you much less viable. Want to be a badass? You need to find a PC to train you. Or join one of the clans that offers NPC sparring to help alleviate this issue.

For better or worse it seems like the immortals are pushing the game towards forced interactions. On the one hand it's good for roleplay to pull others into your play.
On the other hand if you can't   because you're one of five people online and they're incapable/uninterested in helping you, well, I guess you just don't get to interact with those systems.

[racurtne]

I think it's a reference to a number of potential off-peak problems, and I'm sure there are more, but the glaring ones are below:

1. You can't get cures that aren't on an NPC because you have no allies with the brew skill and you yourself don't have the brew skill.
2. You can't get poisons above base level because while you have the poison skill, you don't have brew. Meanwhile, you ALSO don't have an ally with brew to help you in this regard.
3.Using high level poisons without high level cures is a potential disaster.

Solutions to this problem currently are: Select a class/subclass combo with both skills.

If you want to play something outside of that, you may run into difficulties off-peak, but obviously this depends a lot on if you have allies whose play times align with yours and can fill these potential skill gaps.

Edit: The conversation went on while I was typing this, so it may seem redundant.

I'm a fan of the new poison system, but acknowledge it can be really hard for someone who doesn't have brew and poison in their skill list.

[Pariah]

As a guy who plays (almost exclusively) stalkers who get brew and poison.

The problem is that to make a stronger poison, you have to figure out the taste of the poison, which isn't intuitive in my opinion, then say that bloodburn is part mountain dew and part coca cola for the mash.  You then need to get a native poison object, say a gland since that's pretty much the most known of type of poison in the game.

So if you want to make bloodburn "Good" poison, you sometimes have to travel the WORLD to find Mountain Dew and then travel across the world to find Coca Cola due to the set fountain drink locations.

So where before it was just rub the gland on the blade, voila poison, now it's a whole world jaunting endeavor to make the "possibility" of really good bloodburn, that more than not due to RNG and just my shit luck, will slip and poison myself at Master poisoner.

So with all the above, I do see how folks who used poison versus just pure combat skills of kill homie can be dismayed by the system.

I still think the system is sweet as hell, but till they fix the location of herbs or lack there of in certain areas of the world.  Plus the fact that one player (sometimes me) can harvest oodles of it by pure playtime and knowing their locations, making it harder for others to find that mountain dew flavor.

So I see both their sides, those who love the new system and those who hate it.

[Kavrick]

Any change requiring multiple PCs to do something we are use to being able to do ourselves.

While I am not normally an off-peaker, I DO often play solo roles and enjoy such RP.

As a new player, this in particular has been a bit of a sticking point for me. I'm an off-peak player, and I play in the less-populated city. Perhaps a mistake on my part but It's not really something I can change right now. But a big issue i've had is finding people with stuff to do with, sometimes I'll go an entire irl day without seeing another player, let alone finding players that are also interested in doing the same things as me. This severely limits what I can and can't do. Even if I wanted to travel somewhere else to find people to interact with and rp with, travel itself is something that you cannot really do on your own unless you have an incredibly high-skilled combat character, which is also something that's hard to achieve when you don't have other people to spar with.

I understand wanting to make it so there's more interaction between players, but usually the veeery peak of players that I see when I'm playing is between 20-30 players. Now this is 25 players that are spread out between four settlements, tribes, wilderness characters and criminals. So the inability to find people to accompany people on my exploits mixed with how lethal the world is and how slow it is to train your combat stats solo has put a severe limit on my options as a player.

And to also go along with one point Famous Amos said, the grind is incredibly tedious, feeling like I have to day in, day out do the same actions over and over again for months before I can really 'play' the game is a tad bit disheartening.

[Brisket]

Just to check, in the thread dedicated to discussing the negatives of a perceived descent toward hack and slash we're now saying that having to interact with other people is an unnecessary burden to you being able to hack and slash your way to perfect skills?

[Kavrick]

Just to check, in the thread dedicated to discussing the negatives of a perceived descent toward hack and slash we're now saying that having to interact with other people is an unnecessary burden to you being able to hack and slash your way to perfect skills?

I'm not sure if this is directed at me but It's more that I do kinda need a certain level of combat skills in order to experience a lot of the game. And the issue is more that I haven't had many opportunities to interact with people, and having better combat skills makes it easier to go to places where the people are.

[Patuk]

Having to interact with other people is a painful burden for such fabulous and legendary exploits as 'crossing the Red Desert/Tablelands at all because angk are everywhere' and 'cutting up a dead body because the heavy combat classes can't do it' or even just 'get hired as part of an organisation, because staff keeps pointing out in Announcements they prefer Americans'.

[Pariah]

On the subject of swaying slightly off topic.

I think that in a game this complex code wise and theme wise, with so many different types of players (murderhobo types, crafters, mages and the various racial types even if you take karma races outta the mix plus everything else) you're always gonna have some deviation or points brought up that might perhaps be better suited for an altogether different subject but do have plausible reasoning to exist in the thread because something in the OP or the following posts brought that feeling to the forefront.

I like to look at it that way at least with a bit of an assume positive intent vibe versus a "you're not supposed to do that!" One.

I have no power here in this forum, but I will just ask as a courtesy if we can be a little more kind to each other and less critical.

[Dar]

Would it be viable to have an NPC that could 'identify' a pill function for an exorbitant fee and a chance to destroy the pill they identify?

[BadSkeelz]

Would it be viable to have an NPC that could 'identify' a pill function for an exorbitant fee and a chance to destroy the pill they identify?

jUsT uSe PcS

This would be a nice little service. Brewers aren't all that common even for peak players.

[Dar]

Would it be viable to have an NPC that could 'identify' a pill function for an exorbitant fee and a chance to destroy the pill they identify?

jUsT uSe PcS

This would be a nice little service. Brewers aren't all that common even for peak players.

The way I'm reading this, it feels like you said two things, each opposite of the other.


Way I imagine it, using PCs would always be better because they might be cheaper and they wont destroy the item. They just just lie to you and get you killed someday .

While an NPC would likely be trusted, but the fee would be so high that regular use would be prevented to all, but the ones dripping with coin. And due to temporary nature of cures, it would be a service consistently needed.  Everything encourages you from creating a good association with another PC, but an alternative option to the off-peakers exist nonetheless.

[BadSkeelz]

The first line is sarcastic, yes.

[Master Color]

Maybe it's just time to do away with lethal poison npc's? Make the poisons all sub lethal to like 25% max hp so that anyone that plays the game offpeak is not gated by their ability to find cures. Or just take them out if it's easier.

Same deal as the robo raptor. The game doesn't need to be so harsh that a single mob will track you down to the ends of the earth. Same way we don't need a poison that takes all of your hp.

[Lutagar]

wish cures just degraded slower so you could buy a set then not have to worry about it for a while

a cure shouldn't need to be replaced so often

[Brisket]

I like to look at it that way at least with a bit of an assume positive intent vibe versus a "you're not supposed to do that!" One.

I have no power here in this forum, but I will just ask as a courtesy if we can be a little more kind to each other and less critical.

I don't think anyone is being unkind.  I was just pointing out that the thread about pushing for interaction and roleplay is being derailed by 'just let me do everything because I play off peak' chat.  Neither argument is invalid at all - offpeakers have a real struggle if they don't have offpeak PC friends, but 'I can do it all!' is a H&S attitude. 

It's amusing, and nobody is saying anything that isn't reasonable.  It's just difficult to balance those two things, with our offpeak populations where they are.

[Harmless]

I would like poison murder to be an 'event' that the whole crew gets involved in (gathering, brewing, striking, etc) rather than "let me pull a leaf out of my bag that some desert elf gave my clan in 2015 and I found in a bag in the HQ."

counterpoints are that the person who played that assassin did have to play quite a bit, like the typical lonery mage, to get to the point of being able to poison someone, and that the entire crew tends to be dead.

I think some leaf some elf gave you in 2015 should be rotted, and nobody means that, but as things stand, the leaf you went out to gather on a trip a couple weeks back when you had a crew together is going to be rotten before the month's end normally. That's no good and is the opposite extreme.

Anyway sorry for the derail and the beginnings of a derail about being offpeak, but the amount of time played is = to amount of success in game, yes, and the "popular" areas of the game will always tend to be dominatin the PvP sphere as the OP said, and lately the pendulum has swung in popularity generally to areas that the OP was relating to (the new race, therefore the areas that interact with said race are getting popular). The group PvP dynamic has always been a peak player driven, peak popularity contest winning contest, not a "skill" based dynamic, and the OP also is annoyed with staff driven PKs, and I agree that the playerbase has been ornery over staff PKs often over the years and that staff also seem to want to avoid that.

What disrupts that balance of power (which can be tipped too far into the latest, greatest trendy place of Zalanthas) IS the assassin dynamic. The assassin dynamic is what makes players and their characters cautious, and plan around the potential for loss of any individual at any time, and the assassin dynamic still often requires politics in advance (let's face it; if you have a high profile mark, that kill had better have been ordered or condoned by someone of equal rank, or else inevitably it catches up to the assassin). All of this IS zalanthas, or was, because now I know for a fact it is going to be that rare on-peak and active every week assassin alone who would be feared; the rest of the assassins are nearly poisonless or have a tiny supply and can't use them in combinations that are more deadly at this point unless staff roll back a bit of their update.

[Pariah]

I would like poison murder to be an 'event' that the whole crew gets involved in (gathering, brewing, striking, etc) rather than "let me pull a leaf out of my bag that some desert elf gave my clan in 2015 and I found in a bag in the HQ."

Begs the question if a few of the above commenters have actually been playing poisoning classes and using poisons regularly or not.

The problem as I see it with poison on a dude who plays nearly all stalkers, is that it's too hard to acquire more than basic burn, and till you hit the level of being able to use archery well enough and poison well enough to use poison on super dangerous critters, it's only real use before that point is PVP.

I tend to be a pretty much PVE guy, I think I can count how many players I've killed on two hands in two decades or more.

So I feel the people freaking out about it are majorily PVP slanted, so for them, it's a major deal.

[Halcyon]

As a counterpoint, I like "playing outside" with all the pve that entails.   I recently had a pc get bloodburned crossing the Red Desert.   It took six tablets to cure the bloodburn, at dubious levels of freshness, before my pc got to lead others around for a while at 40 hp.   That felt pretty harsh, and will certainly curtail my PvE activities.

[Pariah]

As a counterpoint, I like "playing outside" with all the pve that entails.   I recently had a pc get bloodburned crossing the Red Desert.   It took six tablets to cure the bloodburn, at dubious levels of freshness, before my pc got to lead others around for a while at 40 hp.   That felt pretty harsh, and will certainly curtail my PvE activities.

Yeah, I've always felt the store bought tablets need to be of higher quality.  I had similar experiences on a few characters ago.  Random snake would ruin my dude for days and force him to eat one and half small of cures.

[Halaster]

..the leaf you went out to gather on a trip a couple weeks back when you had a crew together is going to be rotten before the month's end normally.

That's not how it is now.  It's more like 4-6 Real Life months for herbs to decay.