Playing P99 right now, making a level 2 run through N. Karana and waiting out the night at the gypsy caravan hoping nothing strays too close. Guess that sense of danger isn't everyone's thing
Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO
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It doesn't really get dark on p99 tho. One of the few things they changed because they really didn't like it.
I agree, having useful utility spells to deal with the environment really adds character and charm to a game. Without a need for those spells however, then they become nothing more than a seldom used novelty.
I'd prefer a more deep world, where seeing in the dark is important, and having sow or clarity really mean something.
It all goes back to starting with nothing and turning yourself into a hero. You need to see at night, you find a way. You need a magic weapon to hit wisps? Go find one.
Those kinds of challenges create a kind of organic content. You don't need a quest to hand you things, you make your own quest because if you don't you are blind, and can't kill wisps to get that light source.
It's an epic newbie quest, just because it's dark at night.
I'd prefer a more deep world, where seeing in the dark is important, and having sow or clarity really mean something.
It all goes back to starting with nothing and turning yourself into a hero. You need to see at night, you find a way. You need a magic weapon to hit wisps? Go find one.
Those kinds of challenges create a kind of organic content. You don't need a quest to hand you things, you make your own quest because if you don't you are blind, and can't kill wisps to get that light source.
It's an epic newbie quest, just because it's dark at night.
Ah yea, it did seem lighter but I couldn't remember if it was from troll's having night vision
Laura
Lord Nagafen Raider
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What you say is exactly what's needed but too bad most Game Designers focus on "story" and "quests" in MMORPGs when all we need is something like you describe to enjoy the game where WE create our own stories, adventures and quests.
That would be a missed chance for making Racial innate abilities count again (Infravision), for having a use for utility spells again (Infravision), for having cool items that give Infravision, for having an incentive to go hunt those Wisps so that you can loot a Greater Lightstone, for having an incentive to save up for that Greater Lantern that you saw at the vendor, or to rejoice when you finally get your hands on a cool magic weapon that is a lightsource in itself.
Variety lost, player interdependency lost, incentive lost to take hurdle then feel good about conquering it, mystery and scariness of the night/immersion lost for those that do not see MMO's as combat-simulators/XP-vendingmachines, a blow to the From Rags to Riches core concept of an RPG.
Making nights look like days is huge example of catering to the masses that want to get rid of anything that inconveniences their hunt for XP.
Sure by level 50 a character should have means to make the night less "inconvenient" but that is part of the road to success and being a badass. Why take away the opportunity for people to feel like they conquered something, earned something?
I really liked darkness in EQ. It was realistic and easy enough to overcome that it wasn't burdensome. Pretty sure I had a lightstone by lvl 7-8. I remember making the journey from Kelethin to Kaladim at night. That fairly simple event seemed like an epic undertaking to turn in my inventory full of crushbone belts.
I wasn't even registered on this forum and you mentioned me like everyone knows who and I and you can't even spell my name right; what the hell? Just kidding. Anyway it's pretty sad to see how dead Gucomics is these days. For the longest time that was my web browser's start page.
Far as what's been said the last few pages regarding darkness and death penalties; I agree that they did a good job in the original EverQuest. Playing a class with infravision or ultravision or having a spell or item that granted such or at least a good light source was invaluable. Far as death goes; EverQuest did a great job at making me fear death and Vanguard did not. Hearing them say that death penalties might be similar to vanguard is one of the most troublesome things I've read about this game. Vanguard's death penalty especially at max level did not make me fear death. I can understand it if they don't want to go full EverQuest wit the totally naked corpse run that could result in a player losing all of the gear they worked for but I would like them to at least consider keeping everything else about the EverQuest death penalty; return to bind, significant experience loss with possibility of level loss and the need to find a player with a resurrection ability to recover that experience. By having a death penalty people fear; people work harder to avoid it by learning to play better; building groups better that make easier and /friending players that can ressurect or summon corpses which helps with community building. Make death sting!
Quineloe
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Immersion isn't always beneficial! If they don't like the dark, they can get a torch. Make your nights shorter if you really feel so strongly about accommodating people. Midsommar here is complete darkness from 10:30pm to 5am. Complete darkness in east commonlands was very memorable to me...
The EQ thing when nights started at 6pm and lasted until 6am was pretty silly.
Laura
Lord Nagafen Raider
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I always thought overcoming inconveniences (like darkness) in an MMORPG was a key thing.
It opens up a plethora of design opportunity like Spells, Items, Racial Abilities, Class Abilities that helps you overcome these hurdles.
Such inconveniences are Travel Speed, Resource Regeneration (HP/Mana..etc), Darkness at night/in dark areas like caves, Death, and what have you.
It encourages grouping, class interdependency, immersion, something to look forward to, a reason to progress beyond these inconveniences...etc.
Like seeking the Journeyman Boots (which is a long hard quest); no one forces you to do this quest but overcoming Travel Speed inconvenience made this quest worth while and all these memories camping AC to go along with it.
You don't need to create artificial interests (like story and quests) when you can punish us with such difficulties which we want our characters to overcome.
It opens up a plethora of design opportunity like Spells, Items, Racial Abilities, Class Abilities that helps you overcome these hurdles.
Such inconveniences are Travel Speed, Resource Regeneration (HP/Mana..etc), Darkness at night/in dark areas like caves, Death, and what have you.
It encourages grouping, class interdependency, immersion, something to look forward to, a reason to progress beyond these inconveniences...etc.
Like seeking the Journeyman Boots (which is a long hard quest); no one forces you to do this quest but overcoming Travel Speed inconvenience made this quest worth while and all these memories camping AC to go along with it.
You don't need to create artificial interests (like story and quests) when you can punish us with such difficulties which we want our characters to overcome.
Yes! And I like how you describe storyline and quests to be artifical interests. Also probably explains why I (and many others) can't be bothered with them: I'll create my own tales, thank you. Like when I was in East Karana and panicked when I was jumped by an undead Gnoll with my druid, ending up snaring myself while attempting to heal the Gnoll.
Nowadays you can't even snare yourself anymore, you will most likely get "That spell can not take hold on your current target".
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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Personally I would say I donated to the project despite the kickstarter and not because of it. It's not enticing at all for anyone on the fence imo.
Whidon
Blackwing Lair Raider
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So I have always felt that the lack of tiers and desirable tiers at 1k and above was a major issue. After going through all the relevant MMO KS it's more of an issue then i realized. After Crunching some numbers Pantheon KS should be gettingAbout 200k alone from 1k plus tiers. At the least 150kCamelot for instance got 500k in 1k tiers... however Pantheon's tiers pretty much ensures your going to be lucky to get 70k from these tiers.
Now while you can't go back in time and reclaim those lost days, hence they won't make what they could have from them. But this is an easily fixable issue. Just come up with some good tiers in this price range.. Doing so should be worth at least 20-30k and possibly twice that amount or more depending on other variables. I am quite confident that many people on lower tiers now, along with people that are yet to donate but will would go to a large amount if brad puts up the right high-end tiers.
Really to me the KS problem is numbers as much as design and lack of content. I don't know design or making games, yet I know numbers. In addition to the above you have an issue with the $45 and $250 pledges being "dominate" in those areas, they are simply the best value for money in those areas by too large a margin, overall you are reliant far too much on very low pledges. I need to look at this issue more, although getting the tiers in those price ranges won't have such a dramatic effect as the high tier ones.
So the kickstraq actual "projection" is up. Is this site honestly the best KS analytic site on the net? The pantheon day by day projection is awful. I can see one reason why it might be thrown off to such an odd projection, but it seems unlikely that is the case (end projection is not odd, just how it arrives at it, Although saying it will end at 650k-1.3m is something anyone could tell you, and pretty useless) based on it's pantheon projection it looks like a rather awful projection system. I think I may look into starting a blog or site on Ks analytics is their is not a good one around.
Beyond projecting KS performance over the funding period their is more stuff you can learn from crunching KS numbers. For example i am pretty sure I could come up with a system to give all your typical types of "rewards" an objective value that with a few variables (project size/type and more complex stuff) could give projects the best pricing of tiers. Also it should not be hard to come up with a system to maximize the money from reward tiers in each price-range.
Now while you can't go back in time and reclaim those lost days, hence they won't make what they could have from them. But this is an easily fixable issue. Just come up with some good tiers in this price range.. Doing so should be worth at least 20-30k and possibly twice that amount or more depending on other variables. I am quite confident that many people on lower tiers now, along with people that are yet to donate but will would go to a large amount if brad puts up the right high-end tiers.
Really to me the KS problem is numbers as much as design and lack of content. I don't know design or making games, yet I know numbers. In addition to the above you have an issue with the $45 and $250 pledges being "dominate" in those areas, they are simply the best value for money in those areas by too large a margin, overall you are reliant far too much on very low pledges. I need to look at this issue more, although getting the tiers in those price ranges won't have such a dramatic effect as the high tier ones.
So the kickstraq actual "projection" is up. Is this site honestly the best KS analytic site on the net? The pantheon day by day projection is awful. I can see one reason why it might be thrown off to such an odd projection, but it seems unlikely that is the case (end projection is not odd, just how it arrives at it, Although saying it will end at 650k-1.3m is something anyone could tell you, and pretty useless) based on it's pantheon projection it looks like a rather awful projection system. I think I may look into starting a blog or site on Ks analytics is their is not a good one around.
Beyond projecting KS performance over the funding period their is more stuff you can learn from crunching KS numbers. For example i am pretty sure I could come up with a system to give all your typical types of "rewards" an objective value that with a few variables (project size/type and more complex stuff) could give projects the best pricing of tiers. Also it should not be hard to come up with a system to maximize the money from reward tiers in each price-range.
I would love to see a Website that does a better job then Kicktraq with their predictions or whatever they call them. I think they do not even factor in the initial high surges at the start and the end of Kickstarters, which is the least they can do. Right now their trend-graph is nothing more then simply averaging what has been donated so far and use a linear equation for the rest of the KS.
Their projection graph seems to be a better indication, not sure how they base that one but it seems to be taken into account the deceleration that takes place in some way. Even so, that one is still a slowly inclining line, where as in reality many Kickstarters(certainly the Game KS) show a bowl shaped form with a steep surge at the end.
What makes predicting so tough is the fact that KS are all so different: Different amount of pledge-tiers, different length of how long the KS will be running, different product(I feel that KS that sell physical goods have different graphs then for instance game-KS ers).
What they should start to do (and they might be planning this) is look at previous Kickstarters, try to categorize them according to several parameters (Length, amount of tiers and off course type of product and such, how their graphs developed) and then see if there are patterns to be found here. Off course for this to be somewhat reliable, they have to have a huge amount of finished kickstarters to begin with.
I think in a few years from now, the predictions will become better.
Yea what they need to do is take off day one earnings, reduce the overall goal by the day one earnings, and start tracking after that. That would give a much more accurate forecast.
I'm currently at the $600 tier. If they do the $1000 tier with a design an item in the $1200-1500 range I would be very interested in going there if my taxes look good after I get my w2s later this month.
If the $10,000 tiers ever fill up again; rather than increasing the amount of those allowed they should create an $8000ish tier that is similar to the $10,000 tier but instead of creating a raid dungeon for top level players it could be to create a low-mid level group zone.
Also the current $3000 seems a bit overpriced for what it gives. If they added the design an item benefits on that one it would be a lot more attractive.
Whidon
Blackwing Lair Raider
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A better and still simple way of doing this would be to figure out the % of daily earnings in each KS that they get relative to day 1+2 amounts and use that to project the days after. IE if A similar projects to one being projected average 200k on day1+2 then averaged 20 in days 3-5 and 10k in days 5-28 followed by 170k on the last two days. You could simply turn that into % and project based off that. (ie: 10% on days 5-28.. 85% on last cpl days) this alone would seem to be better then the current projection system, and their is a bunch of other easy to add stuff to improve it much further.
For example the above would not come out with a decent pantheon projection because it's day 1-2 and the following are skewed. so you make a different algorithm for different funding "shapes".
Projecting this stuff does not look very hard. there are tons of guys like me on the fringes of the sabrmetric/sports data analysis industry because there are just not enough jobs in it. Any of the people in that group should be able to make a really good projection system for KS, the variables really are not soo insane, hell it's nothing compared to projecting player/team performance in most sports.
There's a really great thread about it on PJPantheon where one of the devs shows up and explains:UGC Server Stretch Goal | Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
And yes. When we talk about darkness at night people need to take off the rose colored glasses. It sucked. Until I was much higher level I used to have to just sit and wait it out cause I couldn't see dick. It was a dumb mechanic. And as was discussed a month ago or so, some zones you couldn't even fucking leave because it was pitch black and you couldn't find your way out. Hello Surefall....I'm looking at you!
Whidon
Blackwing Lair Raider
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The way I see it, and this is part of how we choose our prices when selling floor space/sponshoships ect.. in trade shows. Every customer essentially has a price range they will buy in if they are satisfied with the options in that price range. IE: the people buying the $45 should not be people capable of buying $500. The KS should be aiming to get the max area price range they are willing to go to for each person and it's not failing in this.