Well, Rias, you know I'm not one to be particularly quiet about the things that bug me, and you and I have gone back and forth on the thaumaturgy thing enough already. The only thing I could add to the conversation at this point is that you've made it clear that thaumaturgy and the Church of Light aren't going to change, as they are your wish-fulfillment pet projects (which sounds worse than it is and you've called the Church that yourself), so I don't see the point to discussing it any further. And I've told people that. But I also think you handled the establishment of the Wyrvardn and Jilliana's leaving the Templar for that guild especially well, so it isn't like there aren't options for people who don't like the Knights Templar. I think getting that non-thaumaturgic healing guild out will further alleviate the situation by giving people an option who want to heal but don't fit the Monastic Order, so I was pleased when I heard that is in development.Rias wrote:We would love to have more specific feedback. The hot topics I can think of are mostly Church related - the more involved/patience-requiring initiation consideration process, more specific thaumaturgic guidelines (they were always the expectation from the beginning; now they're just more clarified), adhering to behavioral guidelines in general - a lot of people don't like that they have to do this (I'm still not sure why they want to be in the guilds if that's the case, but I've never gotten an answer on that).
I wasn't going to say anything at first, but since you're asking: A contributing factor to my deciding to take a break from CLOK is that there's been several recent changes that have added to my game-related stress, when I have more than enough RL stress right now, and I figured that I should distance myself from the game before evaluating said changes. I wanted to see if the changes were actually bad or if I was just suffering from "This isn't how it used to be, and I don't like it." And I was thinking that maybe the individual changes weren't too bad, but they seemed to come back to back to back which just compounded the effect. Most of this is stuff that I've already emailed you about, but here you go:The non-Church-related things I can recall hearing a good deal of complaints about are horses getting tired (the general outcry was "make it less so", which we did, and I haven't heard anything on the subject since), and the recent nutrition expended on energy regeneration, which I also haven't heard any further feedback on after the initial burst and tweaking, so I'm assuming we've found a happy place there.
So, what are the big-ticket issues? I hear a lot about long-time players getting grumpy or wanting to leave, or people saying CLOK is in a big decline. I hope some of the people feeling this way will give us some specific details as to why they think that is. I've had a couple people make some general allusions, but for the most part it seems they're content to be upset about it but not make it clear to staff.
Here's your chance to be bold. Voice your opinions, tell us why you're upset with CLOK, and give us a chance to actually do something about it. Complain to your friends about it to vent, sure - but it would be really useful if you took the major points of your vent and then informed us on staff so that we can realize the concerns are there and address the specific points. Help us know and address the problems in CLOK. If we never hear about it, we can't take care of it.
The Hunger Game
Unless things have changed since after my break, hunger is still pretty bad. I was giving you a chance to tweak it before saying anything further. Quite frankly, I don't see why we have a hunger mechanic at all, and if it was my game, I'd get rid of the entire system since it does nothing but frustrate players. I do remember how I've posted that "Some things are there to kill, annoy, or inconvenience you," but that was about mobs. The difference is that CLOK is a combat MUD, so the fact that there are nasty things wanting to eat my face and not drop phat lewt is expected. CLOK is not a survival game, so having my exploration, roleplay, and combat interrupted by a "You're starving!" message is just irksome. It contributes nothing, and it interferes with my ability to enjoy the real game.
If CLOK was a survival game, it'd be a different story. I'd be expecting to worry about things like hunger, thirst, exposure, and not digging my poop hole upriver... and I probably wouldn't play. Some of it doesn't even make sense: It takes close to a real life month to straight-up starve to death, but we'll die from it in CLOK in a matter of minutes. You can die from dehydration in three days, but there's no system for that at all. Hypothermia is pretty crappy and can kill you in hours (unless you fall in a river or something and then you're screwed), but usually not if you're wearing warming layers and keep moving unless it is obscenely cold. A lot of times I've had to ditch warming layers if I was moving. Frostbite is the more typical problem, but even that is mitigated with proper gear. Heat stroke or heat exhaustion can drop you in a matter if minutes if you're dehydrated and wearing too much junk, but there's no system for that at all.
So you have a couple of half-implemented systems from a game I don't want to play mixed in with the game that I do want to play. I got pretty good at ignoring those parts, and then you made them harder to ignore.
Mounted Dodge
I'm a member of a light armor guild (I would have said unarmored, but more on that in a moment), that rides horses (it's in the name), and uses ranged weapons. That means that my one and only defense in most situations is dodge, and that only defense is penalized by close to 50% when I'm mounted like my guild says I should be. It's discouraging. I feel like I'm being penalized/punished for playing the way that I'm supposed to play because if I go out there mounted and in light armor, I get my ass handed to me and start burning through poultices. The only way for me to be successful is by not roleplaying my character appropriately. A lot of this I attribute to the fact that the guild is new, but it still sucks.
Healing/Poultices
This is a pain in the ass, and my efforts to address it were rebuffed or ignored. That does have a discouraging effect on people offering complaints or suggestions. Anyways, whenever I do try going dodge-based and lightly armored, I get smacked around. One good hit gives me a moderate wound, and that means needing to run all the way back to the infirmary or use a poultice every time. It takes more time to make poultices than it does to burn through them, and I don't play CLOK to be a herbalist. It's something I do to support what I want to do, which is fight, and that means all that time spent trying (and failing) to find herbs, grind herbs (which doesn't even grant skill anymore), and assemble poultices is work. Mind-numbing, carpal tunnel-inducing work that I half-heartedly do on one monitor while screwing around with the internet on another since I won't automate it lest I get an ASP.
Eye Shots
Rias, I remember you wistfully talking about a player who tried a "hardcore" character who didn't come back from death and being sad that he died so quickly and that no one tries that anymore. Or that people don't take death seriously. Well, I've got the answer for you: Eye shots. Freaking eye shots. I will never play a hardcore character on CLOK because hours upon hours of work can be lost by a single die roll that is completely out of my control. I once racked up three eye-shot deaths in a couple of hours at which point I called it a night, and by that I mean that I was decked out in full plate except for my eyes (because of perception) and that three different bears ate my face for 51, 53, and 57 points of damage.
This is also why people stop roleplaying death like it matters: I tried that when I first started playing, and then I just started getting annoyed. Jilliana would be upset whenever she found my body, but by that point I was less "getting killed is a traumatic experience and I should roleplay it as such" and more "Again?! WTF am I supposed to do about lucky one-hit kills? Get off my back. This has happened before and you'll know it'll happen again and I need to get back to work."
You might be reading this and thinking, "But it's realistic! People drop dead in real life from a single shot all the time." Yeah, they do, but they also don't train solely with force-on-force live-fire exercises. They spend hours, weeks, months, and sometimes years training to hone their skills before entering combat. CLOK isn't that kind of MUD. I have played that kind of MUD, where all characters were hardcore characters and you trained and roleplayed your skill gains in non-lethal scenarios before it was show time, but CLOK isn't it. If you want people to take death seriously in a game like CLOK, they need to feel like they had control over the situation. If they died, it needs to be because they screwed up, and not because the RNG got pissy. I used to pride myself on a low death count because I played smart and knew my limits, but that stopped when I started getting killed at the drop of a hat.
It makes me wonder how any of these NPCs develop their skills. The world in general is just comically lethal at times. Feeding your hand through a sawmill is a career-ending event that virtually only happens if you do something extremely dumb, but it's a regular occurrence in CLOK. I've done it twice in one hour. Are there any mortal lumberjacks or miners? How do they survive the falling trees and rocks?
Armor Weight
In my ongoing quest to not die randomly or burn through poultices at the cyclic rate, I started wearing heavier and heavier armor. Actually, it started because I hit a soft cap while wearing leather armor: I was still regularly getting the armor penalty, but I wasn't learning any more armor usage skill to mitigate that penalty (which, honestly, shouldn't happen because if I hit the cap that means I shouldn't be getting the penalty). So I put on heavier armor to train the skill in the hopes that when I went back to light armor my skill would be so far above the requirements that I wouldn't be getting that penalty anymore, but I haven't gone back to lighter armor because I get chewed up and spat out when I do. Now I qualify for Armor Mastery and people have described Elystole as "that guy wearing heavy armor and carrying firearms." FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-- That's Kent! You could say that about Kent! I don't want to be Kent, but wearing heavy armor is the only way I can train somewhat effectively!
And it isn't for lack of trying. I don't get Tumble or whatever else you guys get, so I did things the hard way: I have over 1500 dodge and 1000 shield use. I've heard GM after GM say that a lot of people's defenses are too far behind their offenses which is why they get killed on tasks, so I purposefully went the opposite route and overtrained my defenses. Well, that didn't do anything about the one-hit kills, and you still get hit disappointingly often while training even when you outclass them just because of the sheer volume of combat. Then GMs told me that if my guild ever got tasks then they'd be set at the 1500 level, not according to my offensive strength, so I've been playing catch up. That also means that combat advantage I had is going away.
Still, it was working for a while. In heavy armor and with high dodge, I was doing pretty well and I could get through a training session no worse for the wear because I am constantly bandaging (with over 1000 first aid skill). And then the armor weight change came. It wasn't enough that heavy armor penalizes your maximum rolls, sometimes by close to half when you whiff your armor use check, now I'm getting penalized for weight too. It's a double penalty, and it means that I just stopped dodging. Remember, my dodge is far, far above whatever I'm hunting, but if I am in armor, I completely stop dodging. I never roll high enough to do it successfully. If I'm not in armor, I'm getting smacked around for moderate wounds all the freaking time, and now I've hit the point where I'm fighting nasty things that ambush you, knock you down, throw you around, and whatever else.
By the way, professional warriors don't wear things that keep them from fighting effectively. If knights couldn't maneuver and fight in plate, they wouldn't have worn it. I've seen video of amateurs, men with no previous armor training, donning full plate then running an obstacle course, tumbling, and fighting. You wouldn't want to go swimming in it, but the armor is designed to support its own weight which means it is nowhere near as encumbering as you would think, and... Nevermind. Read this explanation from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They do a much better job.
Armor Durability
By the way, another reason I don't like wearing light armor is that it falls apart far too easily. I can get beat up day in and day out wearing metal armor and repair it no problem with just a few minutes in the forge. Not only does leather armor not protect as well as metal armor, but it isn't anywhere near as durable. Why should I wear something that doesn't protect me and falls apart?
Riding
I still can't get decent riding gains. It's one of my guild's four primary skills, and there's even in-game rumors about how we're such fantastic riders. And I can't learn anything. I had "be the best rider in CLOK" on my to-do list because, you know, "Outriders," but that's not happening with the current system. It's the only skill I really care about that is sub-500, and more than half of my ranks have come from guild abilities (basic training and war riding). It especially sucks when I ask a veteran player for advice and all they can say is, "Oh, I just rode everywhere!" It doesn't work that way anymore. Not even mounted combat increases riding skill.
Grinding
I know how to grind and I kind of like it. Hence my skills. But it is time-intensive and slooooow. That means that I don't feel like I can hop onto CLOK for a quick bout of training because an hour or two of pure training, meaning no roleplay or anything else, finishes about a single lesson. That's six skill ranks. And that's not counting things like roleplaying, poultice-making, or raising the money to pay for the training when mobs aren't providing adequate funding. That and the ever-present threat of something crazy happening that requires my involvement means that if I log onto CLOK I am planning on being online for a while. Otherwise I don't feel like I've accomplished anything or I feel like I won't have time to give events their proper attention, so I don't log on at all.
...
My RL is pretty stressful and I come to CLOK to have fun, but I haven't been able to play my character the way I want and be effective. At least I could still train and work towards that glorious day when I get a few abilities or something and can actually be an Outrider and not a merc with guns, but I still wasn't learning any riding while grappling with the mounted dodge penalty. Then the hunger change came and I had to adjust how I operate, but while I was still figuring that out the armor weight change came and suddenly I'm nowhere near as effective as I was before. And one of the few things that I was deriving enjoyment from, moving into high-level hunting areas and getting damn good at skinning and leatherworking, blew up in my face when I was told that going back into Stone Canyon would trigger a war. Which is cool. It's an event. The timing was just personally bad with everything else going on in my life both inside and outside of CLOK and crossed the threshold of how much serious business I had the energy to deal with.
There's no one thing I can point to and say "That's why CLOK stopped being fun." It's more a series of smaller things that piled up the stress to tip the balance away from enjoyment. So I stopped. I'm taking a break, and I figured I'd come back later and try combat when I can fairly evaluate the changes instead of constantly thinking, "This wasn't this frustrating yesterday. Yesterday I was kicking ass and having fun. Today I'm not." And maybe a few changes would happen in the interim.
And for the people who are wondering whether or not Rias really wants us to discuss these things, you should know that I talk to him whenever I make the boards blow up about a game issue. You don't see it because I usually do it via PM, email, or Skype/IRC him, but take this Skype exchange about a previous discussion for example:
I've never had Rias tell me not to post something, but I will say that if an issue is of a more delicate nature that I'll email the GMs or even just him directly about the problem instead of use the boards. Sometimes it is a lot easier to get something resolved when you use discretion and give the people involved a chance to fix it without making it blow up in public. And that isn't a CLOK thing but a life thing. The one thing I've never done is complain about something on chat and expect to get it resolved. Chat was the worst option for fixing problems: Completely indiscreet, no guarantee that staff was actually watching, and no permanency.[7/25/2014 5:31:25 PM] Elystole: I'm writing a reply to your reply to my post on the boards, but I'm hesitant to post it because I don't like publicly disagreeing so soon after the last disagreement on the church guidelines. Even if I am taking my time writing it to try and make sure I don't sound the least bit snarky.
[7/25/2014 5:38:17 PM] Rias Clokdevski: Go ahead, the BBS has been too quiet anyway.