Llywar
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Posts posted by Llywar
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I'm still a relative newbie, and I just wanted to share a few observations about leveling.
Leveling alch is very straightforward - you can make profit on just about everything, and there is a new item to alch about every two levels or so. This lets me steadily invest in nexuses and books while leveling the skill progressively. There aren't places to stall short of level 30+ where you're getting 30 xp with a lot of time investment trying to go from level 20-21 or something like that. Instead, as you gain levels you can switch to higher-xp items to alch and keep making steady progress.
Leveling manuf is also somewhat straightforward, although much more expensive. Won't say much about this since I think it is a known issue and seems to be talked to death.
Leveling a/d doesn't seem to be very straightforward. There are fairly progressive animals up to wolves or so that you can gain xp on. However, wolves are not common and the spawns tend to be pretty heavily camped (often by high-level chars that seem to be working the fur trade, or maybe gathering rawmats for summoning or something). You need to kill a lot of wolves to get to the point where you can start taking on skeletons and goblins, and this isn't easy when there are 8 people pacing around the wolf spawns. Maybe a suggestion might be to add some more mid-level animals and spread them out across many maps so that they can have a life expectancy of more than 5 seconds.
Ideally somebody starting out should be able to have some idea of what they can work on next. And you need lots of intermediate levels so that you can increase your xp-gain as you level.
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Well, it turns out the trick is to post a bug report. After numerous attempts it is working just fine now...
Are we sure nobody touched anything on the server in the last day or two?
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Hmm - my assumption was that given it was a cipher with a key that a more conventional cipher had been employed, although cryptanalysis of such a short message looked to be very difficult. I graphed the numbers and did see some hint of periodicity, but that was obviously coincidental (and the periodicity wasn't exact enough in any case to suggest a key length).
When I saw the hint regarding type of cipher employed I had assumed that the same system was employed, and that the numbers would refer to a count of words within the book, and figured that I'd have to look at the longer books and count through hundreds of words.
Obviously others were able to solve the riddle, although without any information to go on regarding the algorithm it was obviously an exercise in brute-force trying various tricks. The other issue is that there is no way to guess whether you're onto the right solution. If my guess is that the numbers refer to page/line/word taking the whole word there is no way to tell if I'm right without scanning every book in the game. Then if that is wrong I might take just the first letter of the word, or the last letter - each time having to do a lot of work to test the theory. Ditto for just counting words from the start of the book (and do you include the titles?).
Then again, I suppose that codebreaking never was easy work, but I suspect that even the professionals either need a LOT of data to analyze or some intelligence regarding the algorithm to get far.
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I am a bit curious as to how you knew you 'found' it, if nothing happened? You realise, of course, that you need to use the pointing finger, and not the clenched hand as is used for making fires and cooking meat.
Well, that would be the reason I resorted to a spoiler - how else would I know if I had found it.
If you want I can post the coords of the flower I've been madly clicking on with the pointing finger cursor - just in case it is in fact the wrong one.
I figured that perhaps the quest got broken in an upgrade and all the regulars haven't run through it in a while.
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I managed to find the flower in the dream quest on the lsland (I won't post any spoiling details), but when I tried to "use" it nothing happened, despite many attempts to do so. I tried clicking on the other flowers in the cluster to no avail, and harvesting the flower didn't help. Not sure if this is a bug, but it happened on both a linux and windows client.
Can somebody confirm the quest is working correctly? I got frustrated and resorted to a spoiler, and it seems like I have the right flower, unless something has been changed.
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sometimes it is much easier to gather ing first, you can be afkish while gathering ing, i work on homework and other things while im mining, then i click back in to check in every once in a while. but i will be making my 16k steel and 2k iron bars onsite. once im back to the game. o and i make HE's on site too.
This isn't meant as a bash on EL - as I imagine many other similar games work the same way - but if the general tendency is to harvest AFK, then what is the point of it? It seems like harvesting just comes down to making a lot of round trips to storage - it consumes time and theremore makes resources scarce, but is there any value to making these resources scarce in this way?
I'm pretty much just a noob, but it seems to me that just to make 20 steel bars involved about 14 trips to storage between making FEs, gathering coal, gathering food (which can't be stored (except PoF) - so you can't gather it at a convenient time close to storage), calculating the ratio to stock up and bring, and then heading off to the mines to actually make the bars (with my levels/EMU, hauling iron ore is a VERY bad use of time).
Would it just make more sense to have an NPC sell ores for around 1gp? That would make them somewhat scarce, but eliminate some of the drudgery.
Maybe the idea has been tried and has failed, or maybe there is a good reason not to do it this way. It just seems to me that the in-game economy should exist to enhance the fun of the game, and not simply reward people for having the client turned on and checking on it every 3 minutes. Playing a game should be fun - it shouldn't just be a way to measure how little you value your time.
Which isn't to say that leveling can't be fun, or that doing "work" of some sort can't also be fun. However, it just seems like harvesting and hauling is an easy way to make people "earn" their levels/coin - and not something that is really central to the fun of the game. Sure, it makes the game more life-like, but if I wanted to have "real-life" I'd get a second job and get paid in REAL gold...
But hey - all-in-all I appreciate that somebody is taking the time to make a good free game with open-source clients that can actually run on linux (I learned about it because I happened to spot it in Gentoo's portage tree while browsing). And this isn't an easy problem to solve - I don't know that any of the online RPGs have solved it (why else would people be paying offshore harvesters to make online-money for them if it weren't perceived as non-fun drudgery?).
Auction Bot?
in Bots
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I was thinking about this topic independently and came up with another concept for an auction bot (very similar to what you're proposed in many respects). I'd have a web interface to allow for historical price tracking and some fancy graphics (hey, this is all concept so it isn't like I actually have to write it!).
The bot could operate as a service to players, not necessarily drawing a profit (this might convince Entropy to give it a storage trading exception). Or somebody could code this and draw a profit (probably would be treated as any trade bot).
Rather than just handling individual orders, it would batch like items and operate on a set schedule - such as every 12 game days (3 IRL). Buyers and sellers would list orders, and at execution time the bot would determine the selling price and email fulfillment notices. Essentially it would become an auction-based exchange where a historical price chart could be made, and this could easily become the backbone of the game economy much like any stock exchange is in real life.
To prevent abuse we'd probably require traders to have level 20 or something like that. Failure to perform would result in a ban. Ideally I'd have all items and cash traded to the bot at bidding time, but that could be inconvenient to users and might overload the bots storage (unless implemented as an NPC or something like that where there are no rules).
Orders might look like:
Buy 50 FE for 5 (or less - I need some in a hurry and I'll pay a premium)
Buy 300 FE for 3.5 (or less)
Buy 500 FE for 3 (or less)
Buy 10000 FE for 2 (or less - hey, maybe I'll get lucky)
Sell 200 FE for 3 (or more - gotta clear out storage)
Sell 500 FE for 3.5 (or more)
Sell 10000 FE for 6 (or more - if the price hits this level sell it all!)
Other players orders would be combined on the same item and the actual accounts would be settled every 12 games. This would result in an efficient market with fewer ups and downs in prices.
In the above case a price of 3 would bring 200 sales and 850 buys (200 trades), a price of 3.5 would bring 700 sales and 550 buys (550 trades), and a price of 5 would bring 700 sales and 50 buys (50 trades). Not sure exactly how we'd set the rule (favor more trades or higher/lower price - probably most trades first and highest price second). In this case the price would then be set at 3.5, and ALL orders meeting that criteria would get that price. In this case we have 700 offers to sell but only 550 buyers - the sellers would be prioritized first by order of willingness to sell at a lower price, and then by order to market. So the guy selling 200@3 would sell his whole order, and the guy selling at 3.5 would sell 350.
I'd give everybody one more cycle to settle up their trades. All trades would be via the bot to allow enforcement of the trade, and also for convenience.
The website could sport fancy historical price charts, lists of orders, lists of past winners, graphs of supply/demand charts (as price rises supply rises and demand falls).
Most likely players would tend to reference this historical market when setting prices for trades - just like how in real life when you want to know the price of gold you look at an exchange - you don't call up 47 friends and ask their personal opinions.
Some other ideas:
1. Implement as an NPC - then you could have a one-button settle-me function that takes your gold and deposits your items (or vice versa - either directly in storage, or whatever you can carry). The NPC could also have an enforcement role of some kind, dispensing curses for failing to perform. The NPC could also broker trades by creating items out of thin air if the seller hasn't shown up yet, saving the buyer a second trip. To prevent abuse we might limit this to established traders.
2. Assuming storage doesn't get crammed you could have a rating system allowing untrusted players to deposit cash/items in advance but allowing established players to just post their orders on the website and settle up later. If implemented as a limited bot you might want to avoid having people deposit stuff in advance - somebody might give you 50k FEs for sale at a price of 10 and you'll end up being their personal storage. If you wanted to take stuff in advance you might limit the max selling price based on historical data.
3. You could have a fast cycle auction for high-volume items like FEs/etc. That might be only a few in-game hours with items deposited in advance. You could tweak such things as volume ramps up if the service becomes popular.
Just some random ideas - this would be like a real-life market and would greatly increase economic efficiency. It might put trade bots out of business, although they would still fill the need for instant purchases (and the trade bots could query the current prices on the market to be more dynamic with less likelihood of abuse - if the trade bot could track the market efficiently it would appeal to people who want their money right away at a slight premium).
I think this service would be best run as a non-profit to benefit the whole game, with official Entropy endorsement. Anybody could just do this on their own and tack on a trading fee, but if 15 people do that we lose the whole benefit of a single efficient pooled market.
Oh, and while I know enough php/C/SQL/etc to be dangerous there is no way I could pull this off on my own. So feel free to take the ball and run with it if you can!