El-wook wrote:I asked if a combat alt is the way to go in this game, which as a developer I assumed you'd have an answer for. If it's designed so that I can't be a metal worker and be able to defend myself against agressors at the same time then it would mean that combat alt are the way to go, even more since I could easily lose all the time investment into a metal worker while on a simple hunting trip.
For me alts break the immersion and I'm against making an alt but if I have to pump 10 days worth of LP ( as someone made a calculation ) and someone else will pump their combat skills in the same time and decide to raid my village then what can I really do against that? Plead for mercy?
I have a feeling the playstyles aren't cost wise balanced is all I was implying.
Depends on what you mean by "able to defend myself". If *I* wanted to make a "combat character" then I wouldn't put *anything* into other nonsense. Why, really? It's just increased character risk for no gain toward the end goal of being effective in combat. Dedication and specialization by necessity involves focus to the point of exclusion of other activities -- if that is indeed how total you want your ambition to be in the matter -- much as in real life. That being said the system has been designed to allow, hopefully, for a meaningful presence of player skill affecting the outcome of combat, and it has been our ambition that pretty much any player wielding a weapon should at least have to be accorded some amount of respect. Even the highest end player should be taking good chunks of damage if he doesn't maintain his blocks properly, for example, and there is also a limit to how much better character skills will relatively make you.
(And right now any idiot with a bow can probably one-or-two-shot pretty much anyone, but that is also not entirely as it should be.)
It is the intention that there should be character investment. It is the intention that combat skills should be a thing of their own, rather than a function of your abilities as a smith or farmer.
I also do not see it as obvious that the dark skills should be the most highly costed ones. In the past it has certainly from time to time been a problem that people have been unreasonably prevented from defending themselves due to being unable to attack other players for a lack of silly skills. The spectacle of nubs getting raided in the early days of a new world -- other nubs walking up to them and crudely taking their shit -- is a good example of that. This is an example of the fact that actions in the game cannot be neatly defined along the spectrum of aggressive (bad) to peacful(good). A lot of seemingly peaceful actions can be used for very untoward purposes.
