why I left

[xavier]

I'm sure some people have noticed my recent absence from the game and I'm sure some just don't care. I've waited to make this post in order to pull as much emotion from it as possible and write it as logically as I can. It's going to cover the reasons I left CLOK. I am not laying blame on any one particular person, nor am I going to put things here that make myself look perfect, because well some of the reasons are my issues.

nerfing for the sake of nerfing.
explanation:
This is probably the most virulent issue in my opinion. This is an alpha stage mud, it could probably qualify as beta but still soft capping skills just because you don't want people to have high skills in something because it isn't risky enough isn't logical, especially when most if not all of the skills that have been nerfed in this way are not inherently risky . I am specifically speaking of swimming, riding, herbalism. Herbalism has got to be the most severely effected by this as while yes you don't need more than 70 herbalism to forage everything in the game, like Elystole said in a recent post it is quantified in the check to see what quality of ground herb you end up with. You didn't gain herbalism skill for foraging past 70 anyway just grinding things up. From a player stand point this is telling me that no skill is involved with grinding herbs, which is not true.
Solution:
Remove the caps, focus on making these skills as risky as you want them to be, significantly reduce the amount of gain for success in stages. Or any combination of the three. I'm not going into more detail as I've addressed this issue before specifically.

apparent ignoring of suggestions.
explanation:
I am not saying suggestions are being ignored, I am saying that I've seen a lot of what I thought were good suggestions get put forward only to have the thread of the topic go astray and the original suggestion never get addressed. Devs/GM's may have considered the suggestion and decided it wasn't a good solution, however there was never any feedback on it, instead because the thread of topic has gone astray the off topic gets perpetuated by responding to it and the responses to the original topic get lost in all the nay saying. A prime example of this was the "couple of my thoughts" thread where things got seriously out of control.
Solution:
I don't really have one, sorry. It's a problem inherent in human nature and I don't expect it'll be readily fixed.

half done things.
Explanation:
For the most part, things in CLOK are well done. I know enough about coding to know that there is a lot involved in working things up and that it isn't easy to do certain things. As an experiment I installed Evennia on my computer and started my own game, I have yet to figure out a good and efficient way to write a stand, sit, lay code. The only way I can think to do it is to put a flag on the char and check that flag against certain commands. (terminology might be wrong, but I hope you all get the point)
As a specific example of something that is half done is pottery. It is a supremely ideal skill to have in this game, yet for over a year now it seems it has been stuck in limbo where you can make everything you want but it is never finished because it can't be dry. I recognize the fact that there are thousands of bugs to fix, some extraordinarily difficult to pin down and that fixing those is a higher priority. It just makes me sad that a skill was released to the general public of the game before it was finished. As a tie into the first problem I listed, this skill will not be a risky one. What will happen to it?
Solution:
Regardless of what players hound you for stay strong and don't release unfinished products. Be straight with players. "yes we are working on <skill name> however we aren't going to release it until we are comfortable with the fact that it'll work properly." This is pretty much already being done, but there are instance where this policy wasn't observed for whatever reason.

GM control in IC issues.
Explanation:
given the fact that there are five staff members, and if my understanding is correct, only two that work on code primarily. Organizations should, rather need to be more player based in certain facets. Initiation primarily, is a distinct problem with the church. Before you go get the rope, let me say that yes I know about the new inductees. Yes, I know that guilds are cyclical. Yes, I know there really shouldn't be a crap ton of church members, especially templars. A previous example springs to mind Imagine a group consisting of random number of other guilds plus Alexander X4. It really would take a great and mighty force to really even hamper such a group and bringing something like that out of the woodwork would have all kinds of IC repercussions that I don't think CLOK is ready for. Yet there are organizations which don't have any sort of guidelines, requirements, RP involved with entering. Some of these guilds are primarily RP heavy guilds, some are extraordinarily secret ICly, some are placement guilds that basically take over the general use class/guild from other older games. Mercenaries of the western coalition = warrior, University of Elemancers = wizard, and so forth. this is not a jibe, just a fact of life, it can't be helped and the staff have done a spectacular job at making them different .
Solution:
I addressed this issue in a previous post specifically concerning the church. I will just add here that a voting system be put into place for various guilds that have need for it. Also some sort of audition type system be put into place for certain guilds.
Brief example: Mummers: newbie talks to guildmaster, guildmaster says we will put your name up for consideration. makes an autopost on the board in the middle of the mummer's camp or in his own wagon (yes I know board doesn't exist), sends out a mail notification to mummer members informing them of potential new recruit to the troupe with a request to look out for the following information that was autocollected through conversation with the guildmaster. espcolor (if any), description, name, and interests. I'll leave it up to coders to decide how to implement this because as said before I don't know enough about how.
Brofist is another prime example, currently Jirato is controlling who enters, like Rias does with the church. Another way to deal with this if GM control is just absolutely the only way to go is give guidelines to other GM's and let them help. I think this would be beneficial to Vinz as he will get to prove himself even more capable than he has already done. ( by the way, I've heard about everything, great job everyone) Player initiation for all guilds, save maybe a couple of really basic ones, artisans, mercs, elemancers, Rooks. instead
un-ICly behavior, down time, and unsuitable environment
Explanation:
This is my own issue to an extent and sadly I don't think I'll ever fully get over this, but there is quite a lot of ICly behavior that shouldn't be in my opinion. People not playing their guilds properly, acting completely foolish at inappropriate times and other various things. I also somewhat agree with elystole's most recent post about downtime versus up time while playing. for the most part I don't have the same problems he has, however I also don't usually run way out in the middle of nowhere to do my training so the trek back into town isn't quite so bad. To point specifically at something in his post though. I have seen many, many times people ask for poultices on esp to purchase and nobody, even those with an excess offer to sell/give them up. I've also seen people in the game that when asking for healing specifically get told I have a poultice and get turned down only to go and get one slapped on at the infirmary. This sort of behavior doesn't make much sense to me It is however another one of those human nature things and I've never been all that great at figuring that out. To give you something specific to look for Rias, comfrey is used in all the listed poultices, yet I spent an entire day foraging at every known place for comfrey, fraer root, yora root, I gathered arnica along the way but wasn't specifically hunting it out. I foraged something like 95 fraer root, 49 yora root, and about 70 comfrey. considering the fact that all poultices require comfrey this means I can make poultices equal to the number of comfrey I can gather, the rest of the numbers are not relevant beyond a certain point, that point being 70 comfrey. Elystole, from the way I understand it, each room has 3-4 plant slots which when empty at next spawn time the plant to fill each slot is chosen at random from the list of plants that grow in that environment. So while not impossible to get comfrey after someone has foraged it all and nothing else, the chances are low considering that on average guess there are 8-12 different plants for each environment room. maybe I said that bad, but like a comfrey room will probably have 10 different plants that grow there so 1 out of 10 chance that comfrey will grow back and sometimes the same plant will be chosen for several plant slots. hope that helps.
Solution:
Again I don't have a solution. People will be people and while I've had some astonishing RP with some of the people in CLOK, some really just aren't worth my time.

If you have made it through my entire post, then thank you for reading. I hope this does not spring forth another rant post so please don't. I just felt that the wonderful people that helped build CLOK deserved an explanation as to why I left that wasn't full of you did this, you did that, and other such finger pointing behavior from me. You all have done a great job all things considered. I'm not saying I'll never come back. I am keeping up with the game and even still vote for it. I wish you all the best and thank you for creating the game.

[Elystole]

Nerfing for the sake of nerfing is what has been killing the game for me. Or getting nerfed while simultaneously being denied the information necessary to make sense of the change.

I'm doubly annoyed because when other players were starting to complain about things, I said to give staff a chance because I trusted them to make good decisions and really try to work things out. Now I feel like I'm getting hammered by change after change and I can't even figure out where staff is trying to go with things. It's especially worrisome when I speak with GMs directly and it becomes apparent that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.

For example, there was a mounted combat change that slashed my dodge in half. That happened overnight and with no warning or explanation. Energy and food were nerfed. Travelling was nerfed. The whole kerfluffle surrounding thaumaturgy and the Church. I know I'm forgetting something. I take a few weeks off to chill out and come back to find that NPC highlighting was removed and that my shots are now vanishing into the distance. Some of these things were later changed to be less nerfy, but at the same time give us a chance to breathe! Back to back nerfs just kill morale especially when looked at in the light of all the things that are still broken.

Then there is the encumbrance change. Now, I understand the reasoning behind the encumbrance change: Encumbrance had no effect on combat when it should. I get it. The problem is that the information on the encumbrance change was deliberately blocked so that we have no way of adjusting to the change or providing good feedback. All I know is that I suddenly started sucking. Now I've really changed how I play and have done everything I can to shave excess pounds so that I am usually somewhat burdened, but is that good or bad? I have no idea. How bad is it when I drop to burdened? Still no idea. The rules of the game were changed but I don't have the information necessary to adapt.

Keep in mind that I see the full effect of other things that penalize my defenses: Armor penalty, ambushes, mounted combat penalty, etc. I don't know where this new trend towards obfuscating things is coming from.

Also, since the encumbrance change forced me to switch from heavy armor to light armor, the healing system became more of a problem than it was. I mean, it was already a problem which is why I was wearing heavy armor, but since that crutch was removed I'm just getting a face full of suck. What am I told when I make suggestions about it? Essentially that the GMs are purposefully making the game more work.

I thought this was a game. I thought games were supposed to be fun. Though when I look at the list of all the things that have changed since I started playing, it is clear to me that this really is a different game now.

So you know what? Deuces. I'm out.

[Rias]

Xavier, hope you enjoy your break and find yourself coming back at some point to check things out. I know a lot of people really enjoyed your characters, particularly Xavier.

As for the nerfing, just as an explanation: We've all got big to-do lists, and they contain all sorts of things: additions, improvements, removals, and tweaks. A lot of these nerfs that seem to come out of the blue are things that have been planned for a long time and just never gotten around to. Several of the ones I d come about because I end up working on something related and then think, "While I'm in here, might as well put in this change I've wanted to do for a while." Just an explanation so you know it's not, "Mwa ha ha, how am I going to make peoples' lives miserable today?" Most often they're design intent from the beginning, but I have the bad tendency to get something to a workable point and then add in other factors (I call them balancing factors, other people call them nerfs) at some time much later.

Elystole, hope you had a good time at least some of the time you were with us. I had a lot of fun with both your character and the OOC discussions we had on adding cool stuff to CLOK. You've made it pretty clear you're throw-your-hands-in-the-air upset and think quite negatively of our community at large at this point, so I'll just leave it at that, and hope you find something else to do that you consider fulfilling and makes you happy.

[xavier]

Thank you for your response and the general explanation of why things have been done the way they are. I can only assume that you have more things soon to be implemented that will expand on the skills that have been capped in this way, since I would assume that having some players with higher skills while others are handicapped isn't the way you want the game. I'm not going to ask what those things might be, I'm just going to keep my vigil and hope that balance is restored to the world.I do miss playing and I've heard second hand about all the cool events and works you have been doing, and as obvious, I continue to keep up with the boards. Oh and congratulations about making it into the top ten on TMS, there was apparently something I didn't know about their voting process as I didn't think we'd have the player base to make it above 20, GO VOTERS!