Llywar

Well, that depends on how you define "excel". Two years from now people will be complaining because they only have 2000 EMU and it is too hard to get to useful levels like 4000. Remember, a lot of players on EL have been playing for years, and often for long periods of time each day. You can't measure yourself against the top 10 list and conclude that it is taking too long to excel. That is actually one issue with the game - it seems like most new items are added to address gaps at the high end (not all - I realize this). Most people don't have level-70 in just about anything. However, many people do. It is easy for me to look at my emu of 340 and think that it is small, when in reality it is small only in relation to that of others. One issue, however, is that most prices are set by high-level chars. Manufacturing is cheaper when you don't have many failures, so newbies end up losing money since the market is flooded by low-level stuff made by level-60+ chars. Likewise it is hard for a newbie to make money harvesting with a 300 emu when somebody with 1000 emu is willing to haul iron for what some people would have to charge for flowers. I'm not sure if there is an easy fix to some of these problems. If there were more demand for high-level items maybe the high-level chars would buy more supplies rather than making them on their own. Steel bars are one of the few mid-level items that actually sell strong for this reason.

While there might be 500+ items in this game, about half of those are books. Do people really stock up on so many books? With the number of newbies walking around they shouldn't be that hard to sell, although that is a matter of price. Volume of trading is good for the game economy. Limits on storage do help promote trading - since people are less likely to hoard stuff "just in case" for two years. The key is just making sure that the amount of store doesn't become a major annoyance that keeps people from bothering to manufacture - since that is bad for the economy as well. I'm not sure we've crossed that threshold yet. My store is only 50% used, and I am levelling alch, potion, manufacture, magic and summon. Granted I'm mid-level on all of those, and I focus on making stuff that are either super-high-demand (HEs,SRs,etc) or are bought by an NPC - so I don't get stuck with stuff that takes months to sell.

I think the whole idea is that in EL you have to make tradeoffs. You don't want it to be possible for somebody to excel in every area fairly easily. If you want to get futher ahead in combat you might need to tradeoff the ability to manufacture stuff. If you want to be an uber-potioner then you'll have to put off summoning a little. By forcing some degree of character specialization it creates more of a market for buying and selling things. Those who have devoted their online lives to dominating in KF suddenly have to buy just about everything from somebody else, but on the other hand they can sell drops to those who slave over the forges. I like the system EL is using. It doesn't force commitment to a single class at time of character creation, but it does require characters to make decisions that can't easily be changed.

Agreed - there was a lot of banter on there yesterday. Mostly associated with one or two people. The idea obviously will only work if people limit their posts to offers to buy/sell. #33 is not the place to talk about #33. I'd just post a topic reminder if it gets out of a hand, and ignore anybody who doesn't comply. And I have no objections to moving this topic...

Relax - nobody is forcing anybody to use channel 33. But, it seems like a nice idea for players who want to keep a market channel open without having messages running nonstop. If somebody wants to tune into 33 they can, and they won't have to watch a billion posts offering HEs for only 9gc each, or offers to buy 5 SRs for 11gc each. I don't think that bots should be banned from the market channel - if I want to get an idea for what new bots are out there I can listen to the channel a little, and maybe a bot will have something I really need. But, if I'm not in a hurry and I'm looking for less opportunistic pricing I need to deal with humans. If it works well it will become popular. If it doesn't work well it will just fade away like a fad. But, you'll never be able to stop something like this by attempting to censor it - that will just breed resentment among the general userbase. I think one of the great things about EL is that the community makes up its own rules (within the general bounds set by the founders). There is no rule against bagjumping, and yet players don't do it - because if you do you quickly get shunned. Not every development in EL has to be an official proclamation of Radu - in fact I think one of the great things that Radu brings to EL is a good sense of balance. He looks at user contributions and determines if they are really beneficial, really harmful, or just pretty-much neutral, and he only takes strong action if something seems to be harmful. I'm sure this will be just another one of those things. I wouldn't expect any knee-jerk reactions one way or the other...

From a role-playing perspective, I like the idea... Not that I'm terribly fond of being PKed any time I try to tour Imb Islands or KF, but a guild for scammers certainly is an interesting concept... For the sake of the game though, I'd recommend going easy on newbies - they might not appreciate the role-play aspects of the game...

I'm selling 22 steel longs - post or PM with offers. (Alas, I'm not quite brave enough to venture off to make use of them on my own yet.) Sold! Thanks for all offers!

I guess the fundamental question there is how much spread you want in levels. Should a level-80 monster be able to slaughter 1000 level-5 newbies? Is level 10 literally double the strength of level 5? Should a mob of newbies be able to take out the top PK-er in the game? I'm not sure there is a right or wrong answer to this, but obviously the game would be a lot different one way or the other. I'm not sure that we want a level 20 OA person joining a guild and being at level 60 OA three days later after killing a swarm of Yetis. On the other hand we should encourage low-level members to contribute to parties however they can (healing, muling, etc). I thought some of the proposals about apportioning xp in relation to OA level were good. One nice thing about partying is that it would hopefully reduce spawn contention. Now you don't have to click like mad on that garg or wolf - you can get the same benefit no matter who attacks it first. Sure, everybody gets less xp than if they were alone, but they get more xp than if they were standing around waiting in line. And if you have some specialists like healers along they can sustain the fighters much longer. I don't want to see EL turning into one of those games where you have to play in 8 hours stretches in order to gather up parties of 100 players. On the other hand, more incentive to form social groups would be nice...

How is that? You'd still be susceptible to magical damage. It really seems no different than being immune to magic. Granted, I think that the better approach is to have immunity to neither, and instead have spells that provide protection against magic but not immunity - analogous to shield. Right now a mage with level 100 magic and an A/D of 30/30 would probably lose to a fighter with level 30 magic and an A/D of 40/40. A small investment in A/D outweights a HUGE investment in magic. While A/D is probably more relevant to combat than magic I'm not sure it should be THAT unbalanced. Basically, the game is unbalanced already - the only thing that making magic more powerful would do is give people who invested in magic a better chance in combat compared to those who've dumped all their training into combat. That does change the balance, but the impact is probably pretty low unless you're on the top-20 list. I don't have a horse in this race - with the time I spend on EL I won't be doing much PK ever, but I would like to see magic useful for more than healing and teleporting...

I don't think an item has to be manufacturable by only 10 people to be of value. Just about everything I can make can be made by probably hundreds of people, and yet I still manage to squeak by. Sure, I'd love it if there were some items that only I could make - I could harvest 10 ingreds and sell the product for 200gc. But that isn't what is best for the game. Not everybody in EL is in the top 50... Sure, there should be benefits from being in the top 50, but I think those exist already. For starters, EVERYTHING can be made at a low failure rate. Stuff that loses money for me can make money for a high-level char when you factor in food and losses. Not to mention the time involved in hitting that mix button over and over. I like that the new items start fairly high in level (30s) and go way up. Lots of stuff for everybody to make. If your levels are in the 70s I think the best opportunities should be in leading guilds, helping newbies, etc - not just in looking for ways to make some gc easy. Sure, having high level stuff to make is also a good thing - it cuts down on the number of high-level chars leveling on SRs making the market easier on lower-level chars. However, not every new item needs to be exclusively made by people who have been playing EL for years...

Selling 1k SRs - PM, post, or catch me via gossip with offers. Sold!

I'm still working through books, so I'm potentially interested in these: Titanium Chainmail Torso Construction Book of Dwarf Fighting Book of Crafting Potion Book of Puma Summoning Steel Shield Construction Titanium Short Construction Stars Medallion Building Book of Elf Fighting Book of Potion of Manufacturing Book of Titanium Molding Book of Potion of Summoning WhiteStone Ring Building Book of Magic Potion Titanium Serpent Sword Construction Book of Iron Axe Construction Titanium Long Construction Desert Pines Ring Building Naralik Ring Building Iron Chainmail Torso Construction I don't have a fortune to spend though - so give me a reasonably cheap quote for as many of these books as you're willing to part with without too much cash (ie if one of these is a $50k rare you can leave it out).

Hmm - I think one of the biggest examples of a grinding/gameplay problem is the blue lup bush. When you have characters wearing CoL's harvesting flowers to sell them for ~0.5gc each 50 paces away, you clearly have an issue. I'll be the first to agree that there isn't an easy and obvious solution to these problems - otherwise I'm sure it would have been implemented by now. I find myself spending a lot of time grinding. The reason is simple - it is hard to complete on a lot of levels when I've been around six months and others have been around years (playing far more often). So, you end up focusing on finding some activity cycle that yields a net profit and repeating it (make FEs, make bars, sell bars, make WEs, craft gems, take profits and make leather helms, SRs, MEs and level magic/fighting, etc.). There are a number of game activities that I might never be able to participate in simply because of the level gap (like lasting long in KF, participating in invasions, getting to hydro, etc) - except maybe on peace day. I still have fun though - I just aim not to care about most of that stuff. I think many comments in the article are accurate. While you want the game to be social you don't want to force users to do everything in teams of 25. You want to give users the ability to go to the bathroom (EL does well in this regard). You need to make progress less than linear with time investment - reward people for playing 10X as much with 1.5X the benefit or something like that. You want to reward creative play rather than duration of play. You want new people to fit in with advanced players - sure rank will have its privileges, but one character shouldn't be able to take on the bottom 50% of the game players at once and win. I once remember a MUD with an interesting feature - to get beyond a certain level characters would only get xp based on the xp won by low-level characters in their party - so they had to switch to nurturing newbies. Now, this didn't always work out - I recall being a newbie in this game and the high-level char gave me the command to type to join the party, immediately cast invisibility on me, and then led the party around on a grind fest with VERY high level monsters. If a newbie were to participate their invisibility would be lost and they'd be promptly mauled (and then raised/healed/made-invisible). Sure, I made it to non-newbiehood in about 15 minutes (at which point I wasn't worth anything to the high-level car), but I wouldn't call it a great game intro (no dialog, teleporting around without any idea where I was, etc). However, it was still a good idea in concept - maybe tweaks like giving xp only in proporation to damage administered or healing-of-fighters performed or something like that would work. I think EL is a great game overall, but it could certainly be better. I also think that Entropy/etc is aware of this and does genuinely try to implement new ideas - I think that if anybody fixes the MMOG we might see it here first.

I'll take the disengage book for 1000...

What would they do with aug leather pants? As far as I know they aren't bought by any NPC, and while I can sell 200 helmets to Trik without issue at only a small loss, the aug leather pants would be hard to give away. Sure, you can make a profit on 1-2 at a time if you can find buyers (or if you own a bot), but even the bots can't sell hundreds of those a day...

PM a bot owner and tell them you'll buy serpent stones for 3000 each and maybe prepay a few, and you'll have a very steady supply (just how desperate are you? ). Lots of bots buy them, and they usually keep them for themselves. If the price is right I'm sure they'll sell...

This is a good idea, but I can think of one potential downside - it makes it harder for newbies to get started. Most people are willing to sell goods for about what it costs to make them - since their goal is to obtain xp and not profit (for the most part). So, the extra quality factor wouldn't bump up prices too much. However, what it would do is devalue anything made by a newbie significantly. As it is newbies have higher costs due to higher failure rates (many items that are about break-even for high level players are a net-loss for newbies). If nobody wants their stuff it will be even harder to make a profit. The goal is to get high-level players to buy low-level stuff from newer players rather than making EVERYTHING themselves - this gives newer players something to do other than grind stuff and sell it to an NPC. New players already have a hard time with everybody buying everything in lots of 1k or more - they end up having to sell to bots most of the time at very bad rates. If the bots start getting programmed to not buy anything from somebody below level 60 then it might be hard to get new people interested in the game. Just a few random thoughts - the idea is a good one, I'm just concerned about unintended consequences...

You obviously aren't using mythtv. I think that if I shut down the server the family would revolt...

I don't really intend to rub this in but this would be of course one of the big benefits of a relational database... (SELECT item.id, item.quantity, item.username WHERE MAX(loginhistory.login) > $date AND loginhistory.username=item.username GROUP BY item.username, item.quantity, item.id ORDER BY item.id, DEC item.quantity;) (And yes, I'm sure there is a syntax error in there, but the fact that I can type it up in 60 seconds shows the benefits of SQL.) The guys who invented the DB server did all the hard work, so all you need to do is ask the server for whatever you're looking for. And for something the size of EL I can't see the performance being all that bad. I'm sure mysql without transaction support will be about as fast as whatever algorithm is currently used, and a real database (mysql with innodb tables or better-still postgres) isn't going to have trouble with the number of transactions likely to be generated by something of this scale. Plus you have a lot more data integrity. Sorry to nag - I work with lots of databases and I find the biggest benefits often come when something comes up which wasn't part of the original requirements. Obviously the folks who wrote the EL backend know what they are doing. But, when it comes to reporting it is hard to imagine that anybody could come up with something better than an RDBMS on their own...

Well, that might be one way to get gc out of circulation! Everybody with tons of them will just horde them. Some argue that the Forbes top-100 list has had this effect on philantropy IRL. Another upside is that people with lots of gc and also lots of rares in store will sell their rares on the market, increasing trading volume (to get gc to boost their ratings). Downside might be that rich people will stop buying stuff from newbies (hoarding) - making it harder for new people to sell their wares. And to the guy who commented that flat files are faster than databases - I say yes ONLY in the circumstance where you want to access the data exactly in the way in which the files were originally designed. Nothing beats SQL for flexibility (subqueries, joins, etc)... And you also have to consider speed of query design as well as speed of query execution - if it takes me 2 minutes to create a complex SQL statement and you 2 hours of debugging in C++ to parse a ton of flat files, I'd say my design is faster even if yours executes in 20 seconds compared to my 45 seconds.

I like the idea of multiple types of stones - it allows each attribute to have its own supply and demand. Plus, if people are concerned about evil IRL-rich people buying tons of bars, buying nexuses, and then turning them back into PPs this would make them pay the most per PP - the nexus-removal stones would be driven up in price, and Entropy could control their supply. In the meantime some guy who just wants to take 1 PP out of P/C would be able to do so much more cheaply. I just think it will make things much more interesting.

I voted yes, and I for one wouldn't mind see the stones sold in the store. Some people have too much money, other people have too much time to kill. I'm sure that the powers in charge will moderate the supply to maintain balance as has been done before - if people start buying them in the store left and right I'm sure the price will be raised...

FYI - EDT is -4 hours from GMT. EST is -5 hours. Now, EDT is -5 hours from British Summer Hours (not sure when they start) - GMT is not the same as regular civil time in London (for half the year anyway). And on a side note - if you do manage to get enrichment stones for only 2.5k and sell EFEs for 4k+ you're certainly going to do well...

Actually, they're already an exploitable feature. Just pay somebody to level your character, or buy an already-leveled character. If people cared that much that they'd be trading IRL $$$ for 50 pp's or anything like that, they'd already be paying people to do it. I've heard 140OA talked about in this thread as a 1-year accomplishment. Let's figure that is by somebody playing 2 hours a day every day. Or 730 hours. For $3650 you could pay 3 people in third-world countries $5/hr to level your character in shifts. It would take them 1 month to do so. Assuming you could get 2000gc selling stuff for every dollar spent in the EL store you could buy only 730 hydro bars for 10k apiece. So you can get 140 pickpoints from paying somebody to level your character, or 15 from buying pickpoints. And that isn't even factoring in having to buy another 20 bars per pp for non-nexus pickpoints. Even if I'm off by a factor of 5 on the hours required to get OA140 it is STILL cheaper to pay somebody to level you than to buy pp's with hydro bars. And for those who think a month is a long time to wait for the process to be finished - don't forget that if it takes off people will go ahead and level chars and sell them once they're done - so now you can have 140 levels in 5 minutes from a web-store. So, I see buying pp's in-game with bars as a way to let people tweak their characters and create demand for manuf/alch without giving people spending money at the shop a whole lot more power than they have already. And it at least makes the process more regulatable. In fact, if EL did start getting loaded up with mindless drones levelling characters I'd lower the pp prices to put them out of business (in addition to other measures - maybe a cap on number of hours per day you can get xp for actions in-game).

Well, it would only prevent buying attributes with hydro bars. Cold hard cash can still be used to buy attributes and there is no technical limitation that will ever be able to stop that (just give the cash to somebody whose time is of little value to them and let them grind all day for you - I'm sure even Anshar would accept cash for pp's if the price was right). I'd just as soon see a price for nexuses, a price for attributes, and a price for transfers. Since all three can be bought anyway why not at least balance things and just be open and honest about it? And using bars for levelling has a different effect on the economy than using xp (it is hard to say whether it would be substantially better or worse, but variety in and of itself probably would help the economy). And I still don't see why attributes are any more important than nexuses. One is more useful for muling and killing, the other is more useful for manuf/pot/craft/etc. Unless you're obsessed with being the top PKer in KF 5 points in either is equally valuable. The biggest difference to me is that at most you'll sink 25-30 points into nexuses and potentially a lot more into attributes (eventually). That and it seems like the characters who are most obsessed with stats don't "waste" any pp's on nexuses and that might be the source of concern about buying attributes - it changes the balance of power threatening those who have sunk the most time into the game with the possibility of not being top-dog. Then again, maybe I shouldn't complain - all those folks with 0 points in nexuses and a need to burn through weapons/armor/etc to grind on chims/yetis/dragons/whatever at least give me somebody to sell stuff to. The only thing that is protecting EL from massive trading in high-level players is its relative obscurity and the fact that those with money to burn tend to play on pay-to-play services. If EL's popularity continues to grow eventually KF will be dominated not by teenagers who have invested thousands of hours of time in the game, but by middle-aged guys who've dropped $300 on a level-150 character with a $100 suit of the best gear farmers can make. I'm not sure anybody will necessarily notice a change in maturity level, although it will be sad to see the spawns and ores crowded by farmers who don't bother to participate in the game.