Just to clarify for myself. You don't have enough time to play to rank a cleric/dk to 50 and see and maybe along the way get some cool RP going that would allow you to mature that charactier into something more than a testbed? Or, for a re-class it takes a couple of days to get to 50, RP along the way, get the RP/PK requirements along the way/while you wait a little for the satisfaction of getting it and then blam, you get it and you learn. Nobody needs everything handed to them on a silver platter, thats just and I'm not trying to be insulting I'm just saying what I feel, lazy.
I don't personally see an issue with qrace/class on Halloween Madness. Anyone can get them with a little thought and creativity.
However, it doesn't make sense to me to just let anyone have leader or tattoo at any time seeing as these are rewards earned over a long period of time for devotion and excellence.
You don't have enough time to play to rank a cleric/dk to 50 and see and maybe along the way get some cool RP going that would allow you to mature that charactier into something more than a testbed?
No. I do not have the time. I do not have the time to rank to 50 a cleric of every religion, nor a DK of each either. I do not have the time to make one of every qclass. Not all of us can play for hours a day.
No. I do not have the time. I do not have the time to rank to 50 a cleric of every religion, nor a DK of each either. I do not have the time to make one of every qclass. Not all of us can play for hours a day.
If you really don't have that much time, why don't you ask the staff for an exception then. I bet they'll bend over backward to help out in any way they can. You've been around awhile, can't remember you ever being called out for being a problem.
Can we pretty please start Halloween Madness early? I'll be moving to Houston Texas this 10/21 and probably be without Internet for a bit. I hate to say it but I think I might miss out on this years madness =(
I remember going for Psi, failing the quest and being told I wouldnt get another chance, only to see other people try 3-5 times and finally get it. That was when I played Mordicai. I've still yet to play a Psi since they were a normal class. I do not feel that qclasses/qraces should be on halloween or any of the leader/tattoo options. I am however for people being able to join any cabal. Halloween madness usually gets boring due to the fact player X gets major buffs and the rest of the game has to take on player X as a group. The equipment for halloween madness is usually catered to melee, not for the mages, but yet theres no saves.
If you really don't have that much time, why don't you ask the staff for an exception then. I bet they'll bend over backward to help out in any way they can. You've been around awhile, can't remember you ever being called out for being a problem.
Asking for an exception is exactly what I'm doing here. HM can serve just fine as that exception. I don't want an actual character of mine being given preferential treatment.
A lot of people mistake showing the mechanics for removing the exploration factor. You can easily show game mechanics and have a great deal of mystery in the game.
As I've said countless times before, hiding mechanics is more of a fake mystery. If the skills, and thus the tactics, are deep, then you don't need to hide how they work for there to be experimentation and exploration.
If you open up your car, there is probably plenty of mystery in there. This is despite having access to tons of detailed, accurate reference material. Even take one single component of your car -- it could be the stereo or even the tires --- there is still a ton to learn about how it functions.
Throwing a blanket over your car doesn't particularly help in the exploration. In fact, it certainly hurts it. If you want somebody to be interested in cars then you need to open the hood and dig in.
It is similar to saying that you can't look inside of the car because you are a racer and driving competitively. Yes, FL is a competitive game. If people think that digging through the mechanics will help them, let them. It will do a lot more good for the game than not. A lot.
The unspoken part here is that those who want to know, already do. The 'blanket' only inhibits those want to know but don't have the connections to get the information they need.
So not only is hiding mechanics a bad concept to begin with, it is also totally ineffective in its intended purpose.
I'd go the next step and apply this to any application-based thing in the game as well. People should not be demonstrating RP for things like races/classes/cabals. These are fundamental to the game. You should have the prerequisite RP if you are playing ANYTHING, not just so-called 'prestige' application combinations.
Simply enforce the RP rules consistently and leave PK mechanics out of it. There is no reason to single out certain combinations for extra scrutiny. This implies that there are extra benefits to those combinations as well (often leading to great disappointment when they turn out worse than 'normal' combos, as @Nightmare_from_hell just told us), which in turn implies combination imbalance. If there is known combination imbalance, it should be fixed, not put behind a staff-locked gate. (major beef I have of avatars in general, since they have no mechanical downside--just give them a flaw and balance it out).
@f0xx alcoholic perk was overpowered before the perk revamp, not after it!
@Celerity I hear what you're saying but I don't understand what you mean.
The only thing we don't discuss is specifics around qclass/race abilities.
Otherwise I have never seen a more open period in FL history... The staff may not publish the code, but if you want to swap item id's... Talk about skills... PM someone for help... Ask on newbie forums etc. Information has never been more available.
Mana charge is hardly a secret. Ask any Invoker in game and they'll explain it.
Selectable skills? I'm sorry, like what? Warrior Lores? Ranger Paths?
Again there is no 'censorship' on any of this. More just a 'don't post on the forums about it.'
Malform - Fine. I can understand why thats secret. Some of it is mystery, some of it -I- think is based around the prevention of power gaming. It takes a LOT of kills to make a malform. You need to be commited to your RP to put it together and we want the focus to be on your RP for your blade rather then a focus on silent killing. We have some GREAT DK's out there at the moment that I snoop who RP whilst they are bashing your face in. (The idea of malform feeding comes second). Just a thought maybe? I dunno - I'm speculating too.
H,H and DI. - I'm of the opinion that maybe we should be a little more open with what DI's do but Holy hands are a nice little suprise I think we should keep. Again if you're playing a Cleric I think that your religion should be such a big part of your RP. You're literally playing a priest of that God right? So its more important to play what 'feels' good to RP rather then for x ability at 50.
Mana charge is hardly a secret. Ask any Invoker in game and they'll explain it.
Selectable skills? I'm sorry, like what? Warrior Lores? Ranger Paths?
Again there is no 'censorship' on any of this. More just a 'don't post on the forums about it.'
Malform - Fine. I can understand why thats secret. Some of it is mystery, some of it -I- think is based around the prevention of power gaming. It takes a LOT of kills to make a malform. You need to be commited to your RP to put it together and we want the focus to be on your RP for your blade rather then a focus on silent killing. We have some GREAT DK's out there at the moment that I snoop who RP whilst they are bashing your face in. (The idea of malform feeding comes second). Just a thought maybe? I dunno - I'm speculating too.
H,H and DI. - I'm of the opinion that maybe we should be a little more open with what DI's do but Holy hands are a nice little suprise I think we should keep. Again if you're playing a Cleric I think that your religion should be such a big part of your RP. You're literally playing a priest of that God right? So its more important to play what 'feels' good to RP rather then for x ability at 50.
Just a thought the two.
I agree totally with you.
That all being said if someone knows exactly what each HH and DI does they can then roll the perfect combo. This doesn't mean they are bad at RP, but they are using knowledge of the class to make a more powerful combo. It is not an accident for example that 99% of fire giant clerics choose discord.
The argument here is not whether people are RPing or not, it is whether someone should have to play a cleric for each religion to 50 to find out what they can do.
Mana charge is hardly a secret. Ask any Invoker in game and they'll explain it.
Selectable skills? I'm sorry, like what? Warrior Lores? Ranger Paths?
Again there is no 'censorship' on any of this. More just a 'don't post on the forums about it.'
Malform - Fine. I can understand why thats secret. Some of it is mystery, some of it -I- think is based around the prevention of power gaming. It takes a LOT of kills to make a malform. You need to be commited to your RP to put it together and we want the focus to be on your RP for your blade rather then a focus on silent killing. We have some GREAT DK's out there at the moment that I snoop who RP whilst they are bashing your face in. (The idea of malform feeding comes second). Just a thought maybe? I dunno - I'm speculating too.
H,H and DI. - I'm of the opinion that maybe we should be a little more open with what DI's do but Holy hands are a nice little suprise I think we should keep. Again if you're playing a Cleric I think that your religion should be such a big part of your RP. You're literally playing a priest of that God right? So its more important to play what 'feels' good to RP rather then for x ability at 50.
Just a thought the two.
Actually, that's the point right there. In game. Posting about these things (including selectable skills like warrior lores and ranger paths) on the forum is strictly verboden, but for as long as I can remember we've been encouraged to ask about these things in game, including qstuff. I can understand not wanting to talk about things to some degree on platforms like the forums, though not for the reason as to "keep the mystery" but instead to promote character interactions.
Forums bad.
In game good!
So if Character A comes to me an asks me about malforms in game, even though I play Ranger B, I'll tell them. With a fair amount of detail, though I'll usually allude strongly to things where possible more often than not. "Try out your DI in the tombs, you'll love it!" Some things though aren't noticeable except through some (sometimes extensive) testing, like mana charge, and malforms I believe are in this latter category, so more information is divulged. Unless you're saying that the more specific information is restricted, too. This would be complete news to me.
But I think we're all digressing from the overall point of Foxx's suggestion. Foxx isn't asking that make all information publicly available, that is a whole different can of worms and is what the discussion has apparently turned toward. If my memory isn't too foggy, I've seen the staff give people qstuff and possibly tattoos during HM and he's asking that we just automate this like we do ourselves when we autolevel.
HM is the only time where we have the ability to experiment without penalty, when we have it. For one day. Where we're allowed to discuss these things in anything resembling an OOC capacity. Mainly because the RP aspect is lifted and we're technically in game. Ranking 13 clerics to 50 to see all the DI's and HH's takes time. Ranking a single DK for full malforms takes time, too. Spread that across multiple characters for the info from the same spell makes it quite the endeavor for a number of people for a variety of reasons. Making throw-away characters to test this during this one day won't detract from the game. A character you shelve to never pick up again because you wanted to cast DI as soon as you got it to see what it does during the normal run of FL won't either for the most part, but doing the same for a qthing can as now you're not only wasting your time, but the Imms time and a qthing slot.
Like Pali, I'm for the idea but only for qthings. Just a matter of degree.
There was a lot of rearranging and overall editing of this post as I was writing it out. I apologize if there's a half a sentence floating around somewhere in there.
The major issue about talking about mechanics in game is that they can only be generalized in an RP setting. It is blatantly OOC to go into any mechanical detail in character. I suppose somebody could get around this by posting a tome standardizing physical and magical power levels and creating an in-game list of in-game effects, so we could say yeah, it gives +10 hit/dam and haste and still be IC. :P
You can kind of get around this using OOC references veiled in an IC way. "It, uh, provides three levels of your ability to hit something and..." -- but again, veiled OOC is still OOC and immersion-breaking. At which point, we should just be talking about it on the forum. Even if we had an IC standard for sharing mechanics, it would still be pretty OOC because this stuff should be the greatest secrets of the guilds/race/whatever.
Encouraging discussion of this stuff in game is promoting bad RP. If anything, game mechanics should ONLY be talked about on the forum and never in game.
All that only applies to very basic stuff such as what skill x generally does. To talk about mechanics, however, we need some detail that isn't available in game clearly. Such as the mechanics behind defenses. Let me you remind you of the utter failure of this discussion. That is the kind of thing I have major issue with. In summary:
Head Coder: Two handed is better than shield block for high dex races.
Celerity: Can you explain this?
Head Coder: No, I don't want to tell you the secrets.
Let me also remind you of an unpleasant past with Behrens:
Head Coder (Behrens): Humans are the best race for every class.
Playerbase: Can you explain this?
Head Coder (Behrens): I won't tell you. But I didn't change anything in the code.
--
Turns out he DID change things in the code---and he was still wrong.