Llywar

I'll take 2k silver - that's 4k gc.

The only way to fix that is to do something really really REALLY bad... lets not go down that path I dont want total reset Well, there is more than one fix. A simple one would be a level cap (this is used by many MMOs) - then people who play for 12 hours per day might hit the cap sooner, but for the most part seasoned players all tend to be about equal. I don't think this is even necessary. There just needs to be more content for lower-level characters. Maybe even items with a level cap on them (you can make it from level 30-50, for example) - then they won't just turn into grind targets for people at level 100.

I think we need to keep in mind that we're all assuming that the mini-events will remain as they are, and ALL OTHER aspects of the game will never change. If getting rid of AFK harvesting works, then the number of raw materials entering the game might be dramatically reduced. That means that the game could be rebalanced by not requiring as much of these raw materials to level other skills. The net result would be a game that depended less on people sitting around in a cave all day making trips to store while doing something else AFK. I certainly don't agree with everything Ent does, but I have to say that he seems to have a real interest in exploring what makes MMOs work, and what makes a game economy work. If this change does unbalance the game I'm sure we'll see other changes in the future. I think the main point is to try to cut down on farming - whether for gc or $$$. Farming tends to make the most sense when it can be done AFK - or when it can be done with 15 clients open on a single screen. This change impacts farming on the supply side - I think that we'll need other changes to impact it on the demand side. Otherwise we'll just have a technical arms race. EL is not popular enough and so dependent on farming as some other MMOs and that has helped keep mass professional farming out of the game (if it happens now it is a few people doing it - not armies of people in low-wage countries doing it systematically which is a problem on some games). However, if you only control farming on the supply side and the demand remains the same we might start seeing countermeasures - such as modded clients.

I'm torn on these changes. Sure, it can be annoying, but I think it is important to cut down on AFK play. That will help reduce inflation in the game (both in terms of gold, and raw materials). Otherwise the game becomes dominated by people just sitting at resources while doing other things and occassionally alt-tabbing to the game. "Playing" a game shouldn't involve afk behavior (unless it is just to monitor guild chat / etc - and perhaps some kind of web-based chat interface or IRC portal for the game might be a better solution for this so that the game server doesn't have so many people sitting around AFK all day). I think there are a few reasons people are reacting so strongly to these changes: 1. People have gotten used to the style of AFK harvesting. 2. People have circumstances that make AFK harvesting a source of advantage in the game (they have a job where they can leave EL open all day to harvest, or whatever). 3. People have an almost-compulsive desire to get to higher levels, which leads to an insatiable hunger for resources. If harvest were increased to a 10X havestable put 10 feet from store and you gave everybody 10X the current emu after about two months people would be complaining about harvest rates. The fix to #1 is to just wait - change takes time to get used to. The fix to #2 is to just ignore them - in any game like this some people will have an advantage because of circumstances. People just need to get used to this - and if anything we should try to level the field. The fix to #3 is to either cap levels (at some low level like the 50s-60s), or to keep introducing new content accessible to lower-level player (lower level means level 1-40 or even 1-20 - not 70)). If all the fancy new content is all introduced at level 90, then everybody is going to want to be level 90 in everything. That means massive grinding, which means everybody needs resources. I think the problem is that nobody actually wants to play the game through levels 1-90 - or at least significant portions of the game. As a result, people want to pay others to play the game for them (which is what farming / powerleveling/ etc amounts to). The solution is to make the game more fun at all levels. The game should be enjoyable by somebody who has the goal of never exceeding level 25 in any skill, for example. Sure, have content for high-level players as well, but if the game stays interesting at lower levels then there will be less of a need to grind.

For invasions my lack of participation has nothing to do with the cost of rostos - but more to do with the a/d disparity in the game. I'm in the 40s. If the invasion monsters are weak enough that I'd have a chance against them then the wholemob will be gone before I can get to it. If the invasion monsters are strong, then I'll be killed before I even see the monster show up on-screen with any lag at all... I think what is needed is a way to better balance invasion participation - I'd be happy to participate in a garg or below invasion (or orcs on a non-multi map). However, there isn't much point if those monsters are going to crash against the shields of 120 a/d chars and just poof away...

One way to be helpful to newbies is to simply offer to buy some of their stuff - in newbie quantities. I remember that feeling of accomplishment the first time I mixed 50 FEs. I then posted on market to try to sell them and nobody was interested - it just wasn't worth anybody's time. However, expecting some character with 40 emu to auction off 10k FEs (at a price that would be a net loss with their failure rates) is a bit harsh. Likewise it took me a while to figure out that you could sell raw meat to people (though usually only bots at those levels) for far more than you could get by roasting it on a fire and selling to a tavern. So, if you have a few minutes to kill and you're in a popular place like votd see if there are any newbies around trying to peddle their wares. Perhaps a newbie market channel might make sense to facilitate this (since the newbie channel isn't supposed to be used for ads).

I find being an all-rounder definintely helps me stay interested. I even sink money into some of the money-pit skills even though I'm not really high-level enough to have money to burn. It also comes in nice on certain #days if I keep a wide stash of stuff at store. No-harvest days are no big deal when there are tons of stuff to mix or if you're ready to train a/d. Peace day becomes a great day to visit TD. Sure, if I put all my PPs towards one skill I'd do far better in it. Having ~30PP in nexus definitely slows you down. However, I don't come home from work to be a muling machine, or a fighting machine, or a potting machine, or whatever...

What the Fed does fundamentally isn't a big mystery - just read up on it on various RELIABLE websites. However, I agree that transparency is a big issue. Right now the Fed basically has complete discretion to do whatever it wants and that means that things are only OK as long as competant people are running it. You can't really fault them too much to date - the current economic problems aren't really tied to the Fed too much - although the low interest rates probably helped fuel the bubble there would still have been a bubble without them. My bigger issue is with the fractional reserve system in general. If a bank wants to lend a dollar it should have a dollar. If the Fed wants to loan out dollars at low rates to certain institutions that is fine - somebody needs to create the money, but it should be a government operation and not a private one. When I want to loan you $100 I can't just write you a check for $100 against an account with $5 in it. Banks shouldn't do this either - if anything it should be the other way around - if they have $100 in deposits they should only loan out $80 of it (not $4000). On the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of fiat money. The problem is that the economy can't grow and shrink - in theory with a controlled money source you can grow or shrink the money pool in accordance with demand. Of course, you do need to be honest with inflation reporting and not manipulate the currency - it seems like this is something that is hard for politicians to resist. In any case, the fundamental issue is that people aren't involved in their government. Until people wake up and take an interest you're going to have bread and circuses...

Ill take: Potion of Physique Portland Ring Whitestone Ring Puma Summoning

I think that npcs need to be kept out of it as much as possible. They're needed to allow people to level through items that wouldn't otherwise have a market, but they shouldn't be the basis for an economy. I like the fact that in EL I have to barter with people to advance. If I can buy ingreds for a fair price at an NPC and sell products to an NPC then the game just reduces to walking from NPC to NPC and there is no social aspect to the economy. The reason manufactured goods are so cheap is grinding. People make thousands of items when nobody needs more than a few dozen. xp is the driver for this. There isn't really any way of getting around this. From a supply/demand standpoint the game would work fine if three people were manufacture level 100, maybe another 10 were around level 50, and nobody else made anything at all. Repeat this for all the other skills. However, lots of people want to level potioning even though nobody really needs another potioner and so there is a lot more supply than demand for mid-to-high level items. Now, all these people levelling creates lots of demand for FEs and bars and that sort of thing, so if you just want to mix FEs you'll never want for cash (even if you do end up dispairing of life). As for me - I'm in it for fun. Sure, I factor in cost when levelling so as to not burn excessive gold. However, on most items I can at most break even. For skills that are major money sinks I just don't do them at all - or I do them in spurts from money made from other things. The fact is that the game doesn't really need another level-50+ manufacturer so the economy is going to fight me every step of the way if I try to get there. That is just how economies work, and it is the same reason why artists work for next to nothing in the real world. When you want to make things even knowing that nobody is interested in buying, you have to take a loss. The only difference in the real world is that you don't need to churn out 500,000 brass gears before you start putting together your first watch.

Yup - my bad. The filename confused me. The gentoo package was just released.

There wouldn't happen to be a tarball of the version of cal3d required by el somewhere, would there? Ie, is there an actual tagged and released version of cal3d that supports eternal lands? What version of cal3d exactly is required? An unstable or unsupported release is perfectly fine, but something with an actual version number that could be redistributed would be useful. I'm working on the gentoo release of 1.8 and I can't find anything that we could use as an authoritative source of cal3d. Asking the cal3d maintainer to create a package based solely on a svn datestamp might be a hard sell. Creating and distributing our own private cal3d release tarball would be an even harder sell. On a side note - it would be helpful if EL stuck to libraries that actually have version numbers for its dependencies - it would make it a lot easier to package. However, I don't mind jumping through a few hoops if for some reason the released versions of a library are completely unsuitable. I just hope we're not building against CVS HEADs just because they're there.

I'm getting segfaults when trying to compile from cvs. I suspect that perhaps I have a dependency issue that is triggering an error that isn't being properly handled. What version of smpeg does el require (I have 0.4.4 installed)? The segfault happens on the initial load - before you get to the login screen. If I don't install sound files it gets slightly further - just past the login screen. Here is a backtrace: $ gdb el GNU gdb 6.7.1 Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"... Using host libthread_db library "/lib/libthread_db.so.1". (gdb) run Starting program: /data/usr/games/bin/el [Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled] [New Thread 0x7f19549e4740 (LWP 17848)] [New Thread 0x41ab4950 (LWP 17862)] [New Thread 0x422b5950 (LWP 17863)] Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. [switching to Thread 0x7f19549e4740 (LWP 17848)] 0x0000003aff873ad0 in strlen () from /lib/libc.so.6 (gdb) bt full #0 0x0000003aff873ad0 in strlen () from /lib/libc.so.6 No symbol table info available. #1 0x0000003aff8446f4 in vfprintf () from /lib/libc.so.6 No symbol table info available. #2 0x0000003aff84a388 in fprintf () from /lib/libc.so.6 No symbol table info available. #3 0x000000000043ebe9 in log_error ( message=0x539e37 "Sound devices detected: %s\n") at errors.c:76 ap = {{gp_offset = 622879849, fp_offset = 1936269412, overflow_arg_area = 0x7fff5c006120, reg_save_area = 0x7fff5ca1d7f0}} l_time = <value optimized out> c_time = 1216266500 logmsg = "[23:48:20] Sound devices detected: ,No buffer id %d in data structures\n,libsmpeg.so,Could not open smpeg library: %s\n,SMPEG_enablevideo,Could not resolve smpeg symbol %s: %s\n,SMPEG_status,SMPEG_wanted"... errmsg = "Sound devices detected: ,No buffer id %d in data structures\n,libsmpeg.so,Could not open smpeg library: %s\n,SMPEG_enablevideo,Could not resolve smpeg symbol %s: %s\n,SMPEG_status,SMPEG_wantedSpec,SMPEG_"... #4 0x0000000000483e36 in init_sound () at sound.c:3984 context = <value optimized out> device = <value optimized out> listenerPos = {0, 0, 0} listenerVel = {0, 0, 0} listenerOri = {0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1} error = <value optimized out> i = <value optimized out> __FUNCTION__ = "init_sound" #5 0x000000000048423d in turn_sound_on () at sound.c:480 i = <value optimized out> state = 0 source = <value optimized out> __FUNCTION__ = "turn_sound_on" #6 0x00000000004500ba in init_stuff () at init.c:908 file_name = "languages/en/Encyclopedia/index.xml\000\000\000\000\000Ç\215C\000\000\000\000\000¨\031S", '\0' <repeats 13 times>, "\004MC\000\000\000\000\000\214\224C\000\000\000\000\0003\024S\000\000\000\000\000(\024S\000\000\000\000---Type <return> to continue, or q <return> to quit--- \000\035\024S\000\000\000\000\000\021\024S\000\000\000\000\000\005\024S\000\000\000\000\000ù\023S\000\000\000\000\000í\023S\000\000\000\000\000à\023S\000\000\000\000\000Ó\023S\000\000\000\000\000Æ\023S\000\000\000\000\000¹\023S\000\000\000\000\000­\023S\000\000\000\000\000¡\023S\000\000\000\000\000\225\023S\000\000\000\000\000\211\023S\000\000\000\000\000|\023S"... config_location = "Your personal settings and logs will be saved in /home/rich/.elc/main/\000m\004\000\000\000\000\000\000\000H\000\000\000\000\000\000\000p\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\004\000\000\000\000\000\000`©³ÿ:\000\000\000\220\001\000\000\000\000\000\000`©³ÿ\005\000\000\000 ¶°\001\000\000\000\000`©³ÿ:\000\000\000¨\031S\000\000\000\000\000H\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\200¼°\001\000\000\000\000\201C\001\000\000\000\000\000x\031S\000\000\000\000\000æÿ\206ÿ:\000\000\000 º°\001\000\000\000\000"... cfgdir = <value optimized out> #7 0x0000000000460347 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fff5ca1de98) at main.c:331 No locals. (gdb)

No rush. It doesn't appear to cause problems for most. There must be something odd about my sound configuration that is causing these messages to get logged in the first place. Any gentoo users will get the patched version until cvs catches up.

Ok, I have it figured out. The problem is that for whatever reason errors.c was called with an error message with embedded C format string escape characters like "%s". That got sent to fprintf and then the C library segfaulted when it went looking in the stack for strings to go printing. There are two solutions (I'd recommend doing both, actually): 1. Clean up the code that tries to output errors with unsubstituted %s's. That would also make the errors a bit more informative. 2. Use fputs to output the string to the file - you're not using any of the functionality of fprintf anyway so why worry about needing to escape junk in the string? Also - I'm not an expert in such things, but I think that the strcat in this function should be fixed - you're adding up to 512 bytes to a 512-byte buffer that already contains data. And a few lines later you potentially add a newline to that. Here is a patch that I think helps with the output functions. I didn't go back to the sound libraries and figure out where the %s's are coming from. Note that I subtract 2 in the strncat to allow for adding in a newline if needed. Again, I'm pretty rusty at C so feel free to fix any glaring mistakes. Index: errors.c =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/elc/elc/errors.c,v retrieving revision 1.41 diff -u -b -B -r1.41 errors.c --- errors.c 3 Mar 2008 23:20:02 -0000 1.41 +++ errors.c 18 Jul 2008 02:21:45 -0000 @@ -68,12 +68,12 @@ time(&c_time); l_time = localtime(&c_time); strftime(logmsg, sizeof(logmsg), "[%H:%M:%S] ", l_time); - strcat(logmsg, errmsg); + strncat(logmsg, errmsg, sizeof(logmsg)-strlen(logmsg)-2); if(message[strlen(message)-1] != '\n') { strcat(logmsg, "\n"); } - fprintf(err_file, logmsg); + fputs(logmsg, err_file); fflush (err_file); }

Hmm - that didn't seem to help. I tried 1024, a few more powers of 2, and then bumped it all the way to 1M. Either there is a REALLY long error message or that isn't it... I did notice there are quite a few string operations in there, including one strcat that didn't have any kind of length limitation. There are quire a few opportunities for a buffer-overflow. I'll keep working on this later...

Just a quick note - be sure to post a bug on the gentoo bugzilla if this turns out to be distro-specific (or if there is something that can be done on the distro side, such as updating the build to a newer cvs version).

Any chance of getting this as a versioned release (preferably tagged in cvs)? I'm now maintaining this in gentoo and right now I'm still pointing to the original 1.5.0 release since there is nothing else that is newer yet versioned (I'm not sure that you would want lots of users running live cvs clients in production, and it would probably be a support nightmare in any case).

For the sake of newbies and low-lev chars you might want to look at any potential formulas in terms of how many xp (both magic and OA for the PPs) it will take to get to something reasonable like an 80-point restore (only double as efficient as the heal spell). Also consider how long it would take to get to that point if cooldown is adjusted. If a low-level mage suffers a 60-second cooldown on the heal spell and shield spell it could literally take hundreds or thousands of hours of just casting sheid to get things to a decent condition. I think the proposals are good ones, and I'm sure Ent/etc will think about this stuff before making any changes. However, since most of the discussion is centered around PK and high-level training I figured I'd make another mention of low-level characters. Keep in mind also that a weak restore spell greatly diminishes the value of the CoL for stuff like harvesting and eating toads. The value of a CoL is in how many HEs and mana points you can save by not needing to cast heal so often. If restore only heals 50hp then there is really no point in having more than about 100 HP for such applications. The CoL would still be useful for fighting since you could cast restore a few times to get to full health before an engagement.

I'll take 6k silver ore - that's 12k gc.

Hmm - one downside to a cap is that it will make everybody a bit more well-rounded. So that might lead to less trading. However, 48 is still very high - a Pk-devoted character might still find places to put those PPs other than nexuses for a long time.

48 for main sounds fine - that's like OA 250 just to max out your attributes (assuming you don't use one PP on nexuses/perks). It will just limit how one-dimensional a character you can have.

I'll take 5k silver ore - that's 10k gc...

The one thing everybody (except for a post by Ent) seems to be missing on here is the impact of xp. I'm making tons of bear stones right now. I probably BARELY break even on them. Most likely I lose money. And that is with making just about EVERYTHING from scratch. I do pay for silver ore and FPs. But yet I keep making bear stones. Why? Because each one gets me a load of summoning xp, and for some bizzare reason I want summoning levels... That's why there is so much supply - it is all the grinding. Schools help out a little, but they have two problems. One is that they are far from storages (even in Glacmor there is a lot of walking back and forth). Another is that when you are able to sell your finished goods - even at a loss - you get more xp/gc than when you lose everything and double the xp. And often the low-level items are the best for grinding in many skills. I'm guessing that even CelticLady is still grinding leather helms. When the top manufacturers in the game are churning out thousands of leather helms in a day, is there any wonder why newbies can't find anybody willing to buy theirs? Especially when only newbies need leather helms in the first place, and probably only 4 of them break in a whole day... NPCs that buy solve this problem (infinite demand), but they create inflation (too much easy gold in-game). So it is difficult to balance. In real life nobody makes anything just for the xp - they make stuff to sell it. But, this is a game. No real economy would consist of a group of people where almost 100% of them engage in combat on a regular basis. But we want to have fun, so we do...

I'll take 2k silver - thats 4k gc.