Game Development: Villages

[Jackard]

Surely you do not feel that you and a few other ?goons?

There are other factions in the game, you know.

[Leusoj]

Wow. So much updates. Can't wait to play again once I get my normal routine back.

[Emina]

Ah, and I see the mods have started the censorship. Nice job deleting my post.

Yup, my post was deleted aswell

I guess they didnt want to show the frogs hopping out of the moderators mouth . But hes comment might be better of not read anyhow.

[Jackard]

If you try searching for your own posts you'll find that to be incorrect.

[Onionfighter]

ChrisWebb, do you have a bear tooth necklace? You might consider getting one since it increases your cha. Necromancer cloaks and merchant robes may be out of your league, but if you or anyone in your village can get or make them, they will help as well. (If someone can make necromancer cloaks, they are pretty cheap: four ashes and four wool threads.)

[loftar]

4)Not to be ugly but that is stupid, for the same varying reasons anyone wants a village including yourself. We are all friends in real life and this is our place, just like last world, we can trust each other and enjoy playing together. Surely you do not feel that you and a few other ?goons? who plan on mass cities or salvery, pvp, infighting and machismo posturing are the only ones who deserve to found a city in a sandbox world. It is nice to have a village, our name, our tradition, our community and beliefs and gameplay, local allied towns and trading posts/cross posts for travel, surely again you do not feel you have some special destiny or position that suggests everyone else should be relegated to a spathering of personal claims while you and others get to roleplay city leaders?
5) No, we and everyone else playing in a sandbox deserve a village and the roleplay elements, as well as community elements, that go with it just like you do. This IS or was "A sandbox mmo rpg" right? Not to be relegated to cannon fodder, slaves, or claims for your village to take and attack when you decide you are ready to. Why don't you believe others have just as much pride and fun in roleplaying as you do in an RPG, considering your signature. Also I might add I have read your personal forums for Codexia I found along time back in the second world while doing a google search one time, I know how much you and your fellows have enjoyed the game. Others deserve the same do you not think?

I'm curious -- why do you feel that personal claims are so much worse than villages? When we added villages back in June, the main reason was to let people share common ground in a flexible way, since personal claims could only be shared with all or none of one's kin. Those limitations are gone now. Not that I cannot see any reasons, of course, but I cannot help but feel that personal claims are undervalued.

[Lothaudus]

1) I am the town miner, I live at my mine, after grinding to Yeo I was bought in to take over the mine alt. I do not do much else so I make very little LP in the area except for intentional grinding in the nearby forest.

The mine alt? You have other characters that you play more often than the mine alt?

2) Very low 15/15, as this update was not announced I had never concentrated on those stats. Rhianon has begun bringing raisins to the mine site for me to eat when she comes to pick up ore.

Heh. Mine's still only 10 and 10 of each.

4)Not to be ugly but that is stupid, for the same varying reasons anyone wants a village including yourself. We are all friends in real life and this is our place, just like last world, we can trust each other and enjoy playing together. Surely you do not feel that you and a few other ?goons? who plan on mass cities or salvery, pvp, infighting and machismo posturing are the only ones who deserve to found a city in a sandbox world. It is nice to have a village, our name, our tradition, our community and beliefs and gameplay, local allied towns and trading posts/cross posts for travel, surely again you do not feel you have some special destiny or position that suggests everyone else should be relegated to a spathering of personal claims while you and others get to roleplay city leaders?

Have you read the about the page recently?

As players progress, they will be able to accquire new skills and abilities, allowing them to perform a varitety of tasks—such as the claiming of land, the construction of buildings and the cultivation of crops—each step forward making the basic task of survival somewhat easier. Having progressed far enough, players will, in time, be able to organize themselves into societies, from simple tribes and villages, progressing through republics, nation states and, ultimately, empires.

At least, those are our lofty ambitions.

If you read the two paragraphs before that and look at the insta-death swimming and angry surprise bear attacks and jorbs repeated mentions of it, you'd note they want to make the game harder. They want to make you earn some things. Why should everyone who decides to start be able to found and maintain a village? Shouldn't a village denote a sufficiently large enough, organised community and not just "three guys with a dog who play once a week"? Shouldn't coming across a village give some sense of civilization, that you've found something rare, something special? A chance to trade with someone? As opposed to "yet another empty place where no-one is online" dumped over resources no-one is using?

Shouldn't maintaining a decent, workable society denote some kind of effort? And give some sense of achievement to those who can accomplish it?

... or should everyone be able to create an alt and simply setup shop where-ever they like, take-over however much land they like without a second thought and declare themselves king of the village without any effort at all? And then what of the larger communities that setup 5 or more villages, each one over yet another resource point. The three Iron Mines they claim "just in case", only one of which they use. The other mines they ignore. The large swaths of land they carve out and walls they build around it, locking everyone else out... only to then have 90% of their village leave and stop playing because they got bored.

5) No, we and everyone else playing in a sandbox deserve a village and the roleplay elements, as well as community elements, that go with it just like you do. This IS or was "A sandbox mmo rpg" right? Not to be relegated to cannon fodder, slaves, or claims for your village to take and attack when you decide you are ready to. Why don't you believe others have just as much pride and fun in roleplaying as you do in an RPG, considering your signature. Also I might add I have read your personal forums for Codexia I found along time back in the second world while doing a google search one time, I know how much you and your fellows have enjoyed the game. Others deserve the same do you not think?

We have maybe 5 or 6 people and our auth is now at 160k. I'm not aware that anyone is doing anything out of their way to particularly grind up the village. I know we have a guy who hunts regularly for leather and meat and others who work their farms. Another also does most of the mining and making metal tools and steel.

I mean, seriously, we're a really disorganised bunch of fucks who are pretty much some of the most casual players you'd probably meet and yet our auth is increasing fairly easily now. There are some villages now who already have more auth then they know what to do with.

That only leaves me thinking you literally are a very small group of friends (maybe 2 - 3 people?) who only login once every couple of days. What should I think when I come across your "village"? "Great, finally, civilization!! Maybe I can trade?" or "meh, another dead village with nobody home. Waste of time bothering with these guys".

6) Sure, I put an ad up, but considering the griefers,thieves and quitters this game attracts we have never had much luck with finding decent players so we stopped bothering to try way back in the 2nd world, not that they did not like us or our city, but they always sem to quit the game after a short time leaving unsightly HF's all around.

Yeah we had the same problem. Of 40 or so odd people who started, 6 of them are left who play with any kind of regularity. We've done well in picking up random stragglers that have come through town though and giving them a place to stay though.

The system is now geared towards eliminating a huge part of the player base and restricting alot of the gameplay to people like you, with your own village, but suggest others not to bother. I just do not see by what method or deservance you and those like you believe you desrve such a right alone? Also I personaly felt bad about it because it was one step closer to the 100's of lame mmo clones out there now. Grind, bullies, small percentage recieving favored position and mechanics ect. It is all way too familiar and a sad developement IMO.

My attitude is quite simply that "a village is not for everyone". If you want a village, you are going to have to do some work to keep and maintain it. If that's too hard, then re-consider whether village life is appropriate for you or give strong consideration to banding together with your neighbours to form a village large enough that it can survive. Isn't that what survival is about, in a game based around survival with no-strings attached?

Now, whether jorb and loftar will add in some sort of smaller 'tribe' option for the smaller groups I don't know.

In conclusion, of course there is a problem now with all the regular tasks being so low in LP considering both their daily need and overall enjoyment in doing. To implement such a system without also addressing this is shortsighted and makes the development team seem amateurish.

Well, this is an alpha, developed by two guys in their spare time that they graciously allow us to play for free. I'm not saying we should grovel at their feet and beg for mercy but their alternative when it comes to developing is: Turn the game off, get rid of all the whiners, develop the game in their bedrooms for the next 20 years and then release it.

But then that'd be no fun, would it?

Thanks.

No, thank you for the reply.

[ThirdEmperor]

Are you aware of the fact that insulting the guy you are arguing with is not a valid argument? In fact it even weakens your own arguments so much that nobody will be able to tell if there is some truth to the points you are making when you frame them with insults.

He speaks teh truth, the insults may be factualy accurate but they don't help the arguement.

Also, although I'm not part of a village I run a small flax/hemp field around 12X12-15X15 in the middle o nowhere, In one day I got my farming skill from 1 to 10 and my exploration from 8 to 15 from harvesting and replanting, easily enough to do my share for a village, but this is rendered pointless by the following.

A: Diehard h&h fan as i am i can only play 3 times a week for six hours if i'm lucky, and many others can't even play that much. Hell i don't have internet where I live, i'm writing this on a iphone.

B: I have almost full change and farming is super high lp gain, but others may not like farming or have high tradition, and forcing people who dislike farming to farm grind sucks and defeats the purpose of this game being a sandbox.

C: Although I don't believe the conspiracy theory that the devs are trying to wipe out all villages except sodom it's obvious that the point of this update was to make small villages clump together into bigger ones. But somepeople want a tiny community that they can trust and this denies them that.

The more you raise one atribut the harder it is to raise others, punishing

[loftar]

Lothaudus makes a good point here, so let me highlight it from the rest of his customary Wall of Text:

Have you read the about the page recently?

As players progress, they will be able to accquire new skills and abilities, allowing them to perform a varitety of tasks—such as the claiming of land, the construction of buildings and the cultivation of crops—each step forward making the basic task of survival somewhat easier. Having progressed far enough, players will, in time, be able to organize themselves into societies, from simple tribes and villages, progressing through republics, nation states and, ultimately, empires.

At least, those are our lofty ambitions.

If you read the two paragraphs before that and look at the insta-death swimming and angry surprise bear attacks and jorbs repeated mentions of it, you'd note they want to make the game harder. They want to make you earn some things. Why should everyone who decides to start be able to found and maintain a village? Shouldn't a village denote a sufficiently large enough, organised community and not just "three guys with a dog who play once a week"? Shouldn't coming across a village give some sense of civilization, that you've found something rare, something special? A chance to trade with someone? As opposed to "yet another empty place where no-one is online" dumped over resources no-one is using?

Shouldn't maintaining a decent, workable society denote some kind of effort? And give some sense of achievement to those who can accomplish it?

... or should everyone be able to create an alt and simply setup shop where-ever they like, take-over however much land they like without a second thought and declare themselves king of the village without any effort at all? And then what of the larger communities that setup 5 or more villages, each one over yet another resource point. The three Iron Mines they claim "just in case", only one of which they use. The other mines they ignore. The large swaths of land they carve out and walls they build around it, locking everyone else out... only to then have 90% of their village leave and stop playing because they got bored.

That's not to say that the current authority drain/gain parameters are precisely as they should now and shouldn't be adjusted anymore, though; but that's a quantitative, not a qualitative, matter.

[jorb]

but that's a quantitative, not a qualitative, matter.

Of course, dialectic materialism has long since demonstrated that the one is always convertible into the other, and that quantitative changes will, over time, give rise to, or even become, qualitative changes.