I get 2 manned in Linhir! Aether and Rakim with Hearbreaker and Whip. Pretty much at random. If they'd waited 4 hours they could've got my C. Duh?
If anybody needs help in Aard and isnt to stuck on my nice behaviour on this mud, whisper Hobbe and ill give you a hand to get started.
Aardwolf is the ultimate grind mud. If you hate golding/levelling here, you'll probably dislike Aardwolf :P I played Dentin mud for a couple of months and if you can get past the use of movement points, it's actually pretty fun. I've played probably around 10-11 muds for a fairly extensive length of time (probably around 3-4 months each at least, some longer) and can say that if you're leaving T2T solely based on administration issues, you're just going to find the same problem elsewhere. The only muds I've tried out that seem to have pretty good administration is Achaea, Lusternia and whatever the other Iron Realms made name was since everyone is actually a paid professional who runs the show there. Too bad I was hardbanned on Achaea :(
There was an undeniably awesome episode where me, Caber, Warrax and Otoron all made characters on a hardcore Harry Potter roleplaying MUD and got banned within about half an hour of signing up. Aside from EoTW, that's my only experience of playing another MUD.
I tried Aardwolf. I got bored of it fairly quickly.
I got my corpse back, used my only TP point for it. Fuckers
It has 14070 levels. It takes years to max your characters in Aard. I've been a t0 r4 for years.
I'm in Aardwolf now, if anyone else is...playing is likely not going to be much, but we'll see :)
Damn now I want to try Aardwolf and I have no time :)
7 < 100
For real Tireless, i've warned you before, stop writing fucking 100 paragraph essays based only on your deluded sense of self-importance. Christ you're more annoying than when Etrius (and before he, Gazza) is in self-righteous mode.
At least both of the afforementioned have half a sense of humour.
EoTW was good fun in its heyday.
Styx mud was amazing before they shut it down. Nothing beat shoving a box of crayons up a smurf's ass to level yourself.
I wish I had time to learn a completely new mud it almost sounds interesting. Almost. Couple things, first off, let's get this straight, the Admin will never EVER go back to the policy of disallowing MP (the one way back) because they are too lazy/have noone up there) due to resource constraints. That removal of that rule can easily be said to have contributed to quite a bit of this shit that we now accept as commonplace. Second of all, Sean, and everyone else (as Draimon very intelligently stated), take sole responsibility for letting people know their real names and which characters they have and which groups they associate with. It is completely whiney and pussylike to even consider complaining about that as if it is their enemy's faults. Tireless intelligently brought another point up, if you choose to continue to party and relate to someone in the mud, you WILL and should have NO ILLUSIONS of the fact of being associated to that person/group (especially if everyone knows your alts). And as for Sunflash and Myrddin, your huge fight in the middle of this comment section was really sad. I actually like both of you, but just sad. That's all, continue discussing other muds people are playing now because they are still fun.
I don't remember, use the extremely convenient Question and Answer chat channels to ask. I just get my highlevel friends to get my corpses for me if I can't :p
So where's this corpse retrieval service at?
Don't play New Worlds. It's run by admins who interfere with player favouritism if you try to play conflict oriented RP and then you get hardbanned :(
Is it good? I tried Dark and Shattered lands, avg: 170 players. It's a really nice mud, but i lost my settings and i'm just to lazy to do it again.
You can spend a small sum of gold to have your corpse returned to you. You can also ask for help in one of the four thousand completely unrestricted fuck-all channels and one of the AVG:350 players online will come help you.
I've been on Aardwolf when over 700 people were online, more than a few times. Guess how often Imms interact with players in Aard?
They pretty much don't. And in the last year, that mud's average playerbase has gone up again :p
Draimon, does your rather unabashed indictment of the populace of the MUD include me? :(
Sunflash, I died to some bullshit npc who you can't flee from so if I go to get my corpse I'd probably just die again and so I'll probably just not play again. :(
Even me, Draimon?
I endorse the posting style of Draimon.
i guess really trescothik summed it up with the 3rd comment in this thread
this log is totally lame as well. its like great dude. you were a nobody in 2002 and you come back and get owned just like its 2002. cry about how the game has changed etc when in reality you were always a fucking clownfish. why would you post this? 'omg these dudes killed me for _insert unjustifiable crime here_'. wipe the sand off your pussy and kill them back or as seems more appropriate, just leave the mud. i just see a ton of whining and excuses. people have always cheated. people have always committed the crimes you all whine about. in fact the same people who whine about 'herks' are the same ones who have leprosy or get nuked for MP. the fundementals of this game have always been the same. just some people aren't smart enough to realize what they are
the whining by the entirety of this game is astonishing. holy shit. all politics with you people. no action. this isn't directed towards this log or comment section or anything. but after reading some of the action/comments during my time gone ive realized that the only thing really wrong with the mud is that the people that play it are total pussies. now i understand why people do nothing but spree kill. thats all you are worth
I endorse the playing style of Aryl and Ravathir.
And that is why you, Lobo, are King of the Herks.
I think you're all wrong.
That's what I was trying to say, Tevildo, though I did a much poorer job of it than you. Concise, as always.
'Being friends with Aryl and Ravathir' and 'endorsing the playing style of Aryl and Ravathir' are completely different things. Let's not try to pass off one for the other. It's possible to be friends with someone AND express disapproval of their cheating; that might be a better PR strategy than attempting to tell the non-cheating majority that they're wrong.
Here's some sound advice folks, go get laid.
Our license plate slogan is 'La-la land - where the orderlies go at the end of their shift'. Yeah, we have big license plates, deal with it.
This just in: Myrddin lives in la-la land and never notices anything that goes on in the MUD until it directly affects him.
I won't 'raise the argument', I will insist. Last time Darrick and I were both active at the same time was about 2004, so there's no way that it was about being OOC friends in the second capacity.
As for this kind of thing happening regularly, if that's the case (I'd like to think it's not) that only disgusts me further. If someone actually acts on the MUD with the intention of causing me harm or distress as a typist *who isn't a player*, or to control my actions as a *non-player*, they need to sort their shit out. Firstly for thinking that that's appropriate behaviour. Secondly for thinking it'll actually work.
CLOWN!
I will break you.
!
Type faster, clown.
Every post between Cruice's and mine took place _while I was writing it_. Goddamn.
I'm mostly behind Cruice on this point, but I think a distinction needs to be drawn that neither of you are making: Saying that you can't be an OOC friend with someone means no talking on MSN, not hanging out IRL, the whole nine yards. I mean, that's what 'You may not be friends with this person' means.
What is in fact being discussed when people say 'can't be OOC friends' in this context is the practice of playing cooperatively with OOC friends on the MUD. I anticipate that Myrddin will raise the argument that Aether was trying to punish Darrick for being friend with Myrddin in the former capacity, but I will address him later.
This first bit is pretty much at Cruice. In most/all of the examples you gave (CERTAINLY the reference to me) you were being discouraged from the second type of 'OOC friends' I have described here. The fact that you went to school with and live near and hang out with Ravathir should never ever hurt you in the game. What hurts you in the game is collaboratively playing with him because he is your OOC friend.
And what I actually told you (or intended to, if these weren't my words) was that if you play with Ravathir on the MUD, you will at least partially be judged by his actions. This means that if he's in good standing, it helps you. If he's in poor standing -- if he cheats, if he harasses people, if he's a bastard -- it hurts you. Who you play with in the MUD affects how people perceive you. Claiming that this is somehow unjust is just not reasonable. If anyone disagrees with me I can make a stronger case, but I don't think I need to make this post (which will already be too long) longer with it right now.
Now, to Myrddin: Darrick was killed for one of two reasons (based on the being your friend thing). First, he may have been killed because of the second sort of friendship -- he may or Aether may have figured he did provide material support to you, and you are Aether's enemy so by killing Darrick he punishes in-game support for you. This is how conflicts are fought. If you disagree, you are just bad at fighting wars. The second explanation is that he wanted to hurt you and figured that if you were OOC friends with this guy that by doing injury to him because of you it would do injury to you. This is slightly more bastardly, but only because it involves a typist attempting to do personal harm to his enemy typist over a game, and that is not nor has it ever been a unique or even rare phenomenon.
Is Aether a bastard for killing Darrick because he's your friend? No more than any of you are for subscribing to the Herk hate.
(And Cruice, I don't think point 1 serves your case very well -- kicking known alts of members of enemy guilds in wars is such common practice that it's atypical to NOT do so.)
You would kill Cruice in-game for associating with herks, for being a part of the 'herk' community, whether you saw him grouped with Aryl and Ravathir or not. Every thing you say to him on this logpage is dripping with condescension and hatred, and it's pretty goddamn obnoxious at this point.
You're a pretentious fuck.
It's the 'control' element that I was drawing attention to, more than just associating people with their RL actions. Also, I don't think you can lump dog-murder with normal social conduct.
'This game is filled with sociopathic shitheads'. Probably right, but don't accuse me of being a hypocrite just because I play(ed) the game. Like you said, 99%.
'Why the hell would I give a shit who Cruice is friends with irl? The only thing that impacts me is how he plays the game.'
You'll have to point me to somewhere on this logpage that I can see Cruice being a shithead in-game, because he comes off as a pretty reasonable guy from what i can see. The only reason you judge the hell out of them is because he associates with herks.
So what you're saying is that 99% of the MUD population from the last decade and a half or so has some very fucked up shit inside their head?
Personally, I contracted Grimscar for talking with pride about how he murdered a dog. He spoke of it in the same vein as he would buying a cheeseburger. That was my judgement of who he is irl. Oh, and I was harassed a lot when I was a kid by Rathmar, namely harassment of my RL personality and character. You know what happened when I submitted harassment report about it? Draugluin warned me for wasting his time.
This game is filled with sociopathic shitheads, and to suddenly try to pretend that we're all about morals and rainbows and butterflies on the internet is bullshit.
Everyone on this game judges and attacks people based on who they are, and consistently judges who they are as a person, not a character. This sort of shit is something that has expanded continually as the lines between characters blur and it stops being Aryl and Spartan and becomes Sean and Nick.
I can only put your last comment down to a continuing refusal to bother to read other peoples' comments. Otherwise you're approaching a Quiauh level of insanity if you think that is valid, sane conduct.
Are you fucking kidding me? Anybody who would try to enforce control over someone else's real life activity by harassing them on MUD has some very fucked up shit happening inside their head. Why the hell would I give a shit who Cruice is friends with irl? The only thing that impacts me is how he plays the game.
People would absolutely do that to Cruice, including you. Every single element of this herkie label we propagate is to reinforce the fact that if you associate with people we don't like, then we won't respect you. You've got nothing Myrddin. You're a hypocrite, and it's fucking despicable.
I think it's pretty fucking obvious I was talking about people trying to control relationships EXTERNAL TO THE MUD. All of your examples are completely irrelevant. The only equivalent would be if Aryl and Ravathir got hardbanned, and people continued to kill you (Cruice) and tell you 'stop being friends with Ravathir irl!'
Get some patience and respond to me then, you condescending fuck. Cruice may associate with herks, but you're way out of your league here.
I defend Cruice's statement to the core.
What the fuck do you think people get killed for in this game, Myrddin, if not for being friends with the wrong people? How do you wreck someone else's shit when they want to hide in their GH and pussyfoot around? Slaughter their friends, relentlessly. Through the years of this MUD, it has been a defining characteristic of the playerbase that if you befriend the wrong fucking people, you're going to pay the price for the association. People judge you by the company you keep, and if you were friends with someone they didn't like, you're on the shitlist too.
Can someone else respond to that, I don't have the patience anymore.
Myrddin are you fucking kidding me? How many countless countless countless times have myself or others been ridiculed/warned/told not to be friends with Aryl.
I have a few examples of how disgusting you think it is that people try to tell others who they can and cannot be friends with ooc.
1. Twofoot threatening to kick Monet out of Meglivornth because she created an alt to join GB.
2. The only times I have been nuked it has been because I was friends with Ravathir, or Aryl. I was specifically told that by Osse who was the dealer of the nukes.
3. Anyone and everyone who has been publically considered friendly towards herks, are drafted into the category of 'herk' to ostracize them and try to force them to stop being friends with whoever it is that put them in that category.
Even Tireless has expressed that I have been getting more respect or whatever, from other players. But if I separated myself from Ravathir and Aryl, that I would be even more liked. I've heard that from many different people.
I think it was only 50. After that episode I never bothered getting another one. Just grabbed those amber vials or a flask.
Is it really only 50? I thought it was 65.
I called him a Herkie and said I was friends with Myrddin when he said something derogatory about him. Pick one, two, or both. It's water under the bridge at this point. I'd much rather die to a player than the MUD (How I usually die). I like to think I can get the better of the system, the other players in it are an equation that can't be factored so to speak. I got madder last time I died doing carapace, when I realized VoV only heals 50 HP/EP now as opposed to the 90 like it used to.
Myrddin, I thought he was killed for calling Aether a Herkie or something like that. I mean, I have pretty good impulse control so i wouldn't do it myself, but I certainly would feel the impulse if someone said it of me.
Just to clarify a couple things... Herks didn't make me quit, that was my decision. I no longer have the time to devote to Towers to learn the new shit and the tricks again. This game is anything but casual and that is all I can be now at 26 as opposed to when I was 16-18 years old. There are changes I don't like or agree with, Valinor is pretty lame, and I don't see many of the unique personalities that used to make the game so fun. I'd like nothing more than to go after Aether and Rakim, but I'm no longer on that level of play, if I ever was. Some of the things you guys have discussed would be cool, the houses in particular. I don't think death should be a freebie though, it would take all the challenge out of the game once you get to level 20. Another thing that really gets under my skin is the discriminatory defense of Mordor. Some people can log in on moral alts and rape the place unharassed all day long with not so much as an attempt. I won't mention names, but it really bugs me. This goes back to the complete and utter lack of character separation that exists nowadays. I've attacked people that were my friends on my alts-does this make me a bad friend? No, because they never knew-I separated my characters, even to the point of speaking in different styles. You're supposed to play a role here, not be Joe from Bumfuck on 8 different alts. Just bugs me. It isn't right, and the new MP rules from Valinor encourage this seemingly.
Gambrinus has leper for being against the herkies, thus, against Valinor.
'one person hibernated because he was killed by a player because he had a contract, or was talking shit to that player?'
He certainly wasn't killed for a contract that wasn't mature yet. He was supposedly killed for being friends with me, a player who doesn't currently play. The fact that there exists a player on the MUD who thinks they have the right, much less is GIVEN the right, to tell other players who they can and can't have ooc relationships with is disgusting.
More disgusting is the fact that these people are coddled and protected by the current admin, especially given their past history. Why does Gambrinus have leprosy at the moment?
I'd like to see a list of 50-60 Herkies, especially considering the recent claims that GB has only a few, and that merely two or three ex-Durms are members.
As far as bans go, I'd support only banning people who've been nuked more often than Cruice (who does seem to have backed off from his 'MP & chronic inability to separate characters' rockstar days); it wouldn't be a vast number, but it would do the job--that is, unless Valinor continues the ponderous trend of making virtually everything but potty-mouthed comm chatter unpunishable. Any more of that and T2T is forever boned.
Aardwolf rocks :) This is what casual gaming is all about :)
This game is fucking annoying, I'm playing 'guess the syntax' right now.
I sent you one, then the rest came back with a lame 'No one in this world by that name!'. If they actually went through for some reason, then I guess I spammed the shit out of you with the same tells :p
You were totally sending me tells!
Why's it say you were on 5 days ago and I can't send you tells anymore :p And yeah, legend was out of habit.
Droki
Sunflash, character name plz. PICK ME UP
I'm playing Aardwolf again. You guys should come play Aardwolf, you can hang out in my manor.
'Example, I ended up dying twice on Dracula due to badly timed ticks (why the hell should I have to count ticks to know if a quest I'm doing is going to change).
1. I killed the captain/lieutenant in the ranger camp, started the bone sword quest less than a minute later and suddenly they run in and spawn on me.'
This is why you should count ticks. Killing the captain and lieutenant first is a -trick- of the quest. It is not the actual quest itself. The price of making it so much easier is that occasionally you will be screwed in this manner. Always check ticks first.
You should have been in the habit of that anyway since Azimor has a bad habit of resetting while you're doing his quest, then he attacks you when you report to him.
Cruice, I have one major objection to the 'Herks', and that is that Aryl being allowed to play at all represents the complete and utter failure of the rule of law in the game. If I listed all the ways this is the case, I'd wind up writing a book of a post (which I am not interested in doing presently). I _like_ you and have for something like a year or so now, and a lot of my antipathy towards you prior to that wasn't entirely justified. I don't mind Ravathir, though whether I can say I like or dislike him goes back and forth based on what he's said and done recently.
The closest thing to indicting 'Herks' for cheating I've done in this or any other thread in recent memory was agree that Valinor treats questionable situations differently between 'Herks' and everyone else. I think that this is true and that it primarily reflects poorly on the current PoL, not the 'Herks'.
Its funny how you guys are always reformed cheaters like the last time REALLY was the last time.
I commented on that healing 'bug' in Brubaker's comment section.
50-60 herkies? geez, i must update my list!
Shitbags in Valinor make people quit the game. Fuckwits like Herks just ruin what's left of the gameplay experience. A herk with 600+ hp of bugged out bullshit healing in his cloak, clearly intending to exploit it, doesn't get nuked? Fucking suggest that there's 600+ hp of bugged out bullshit healing that you haven't bug reported yet 6 or 7 years ago, get nuked on the spot.
Complaining and offering new ideas doesn't mean anything. The game is run by the ainur, they change and create things they want and see fit.
From what I'm gathering, these 'old school' players aren't quitting because some Herkie killed them. They are quitting because such drastic changes have made the MUD worse and they don't enjoy the gameplay anymore.
As for GB or a select group of people 'driving others off the MUD.' That is the kettle calling the pot black. In almost every comment seciton on here you can find someone (and it's usually the same people) saying that Herks should be removed, nuked, banned. And as Shabba and Lobo have clearly stated conservatives suck and there are 50-60 Herkies.
So, you would support 50-60 players banned from the game because you dislike them, their antics, or some other reason, but are completely appalled when one person hibernated because he was killed by a player because he had a contract, or was talking shit to that player? That's hilariously retarded.
Towards Formid/Tireless, I'm not sure which herkies you're looking at, but I fail to see how the ainur are not punishing the 'crimes' these herkies are committing. Dexter has had his recent alts nuked because a pair of chainmail gloves was passed around through PK and ended up in GB armoury which he had an alt in. (Seems just, if you're an idiot) What are these other 'crimes' that are being broken by others? Fill me in please, maybe I'm not around enough to see it. Or maybe I don't have the keen eye like all these 'professional accusers, and non-cheaters' that call people out on cheating. Like Gambrinus (the leper), Skyman (the human nuke), or all you others who 'don't cheat, never have cheated.'
I'm not saying that there aren't people who have never cheated. I'm honestly one of them. But it's safe to guess that most of the people hating on herks, have been punished for cheating, and have actually committed the 'crime.'
I abused the testmud for a couple of months. I could instantly teleport anywhere I wanted to go when they were changing classes, removing fighters and all that, I had access to infinite gold, and I was able to abuse weapons/armor + profchange to get absurdly high skills (Example: SotA for ridiculously high conc/cm, I fireballed Aule's target dummy for over a million damage)
I'm telling you all this to give you a clue of how experienced I am in a mud with no loss for death, because that's what this amounted to. And I was basically invincible (I soloed Shelob almost effortlessly) so I could explore and do anything I wanted. Now granted, I had already explored the vast majority of the content available in this game at the time, and there weren't a lot of new and exciting things to do, but I sure as hell found every challenge I'd always wanted to try and never managed. I learned Dragon Gate, I soloed Mordor Gates and Gimli/Legolas/Elrohir/Elladan and the new MELS (Without cheating, by the way, MELS is a lot easier to do if you play smart and have the right gear and healing) and I explored things that might have violated KRs on my characters previously.
This all took me maybe 2 weeks to complete by the time I had all this power, and I was utterly and completely bored, forever. There was nothing left to do except go back to doing my 'job' and testing the content on change list like a good boy, so that's what I did.
Everything in this game revolves around golding, and forcing you to get equipment to make gold to train stats to get stronger to get more equipment to use while trying new quests to die and then get new equipment and make more gold to get more stats to get more equipment to make those quests easier is the only way you can sustain interest in this game. The cyclical grind is the only way to make the content available in the game last, you have to put in a timesink to make this MUD last.
If you remove death costs, I don't need new gear, I don't need to train stats, the shit that i might spend gold on to make my character cooler runs out fast, and I complete all the available content in the game with little to no expense. It's an idea that sounds cool, like cheat codes on a gameshark or infinite health cheats in Morrowind, but in reality it trivializes the game and ends up making it too easy and too dull.
Tireless, there are a bunch of quest/places I'd love to explore (and things I'd like to try) which are likely going to get me killed a bunch of times (killing shelob, moria maze, other new quests) which I never got around to because I really dislike golding (it's boring, especially if it's late in the boot and you can't just auction decent EQ) and knowing I'm probably going to die (and therefore have to relevel) means I'm loathe to do them.
When you remove death costs you encourage experimentation. With regards to the Tenzek thing I still don't see it as a particular issue. Now perhaps you may have an issue if you're talking about Governor/MELS, as someone could in theory go solo that at boot start with a shop unique, but is likely to lose any weapon they bought as people will sit around and just take it off their corpse when they die.
Powerplayers still use innboxes, guild vaults, carts, food, healers and increasing the costs of them means more gold eneds to be spent on them (I also said I don't think there'll be an issue, maybe prices at the auction will increase a bit but thats not a big deal tbh).
Also if you increase gold costs for aesthetic things to balance no death costs you're catering to the powerplayer, harasser, pker. At least 2 of which aren't what the game wants or needs.
Talking about removing death penalties is probably going to start and end here.
Some kind of difference to the res system for a newbie's first death, however, has definitely been discussed before and I have no idea why this was never bothered with. I'm sure a sizeable fraction of new players who don't stick around leave as ghosts lost in the middle of nowhere.
I started out with a numbered post, then forgot it was supposed to be numbered :( Sorry!
1.) Nobody said you needed to do it barehanded. Why would you? Buy a shop unique and your first hits get to be first hits from a nice weapon. It takes on average 7 hits from a shop unique by a maxed char to lower Tenzek 1 shape (from good to avg, etc) and, naked, most maxed chars can get him to mid avg or lower before dying if they don't heal. So that means all of nd, all of dlsg, half of avg (6 + 6 + 3 = 15) 15 first hits to kill him. Imagine that you get 1/3 first hits (this is a very low number) -- that's 45 revives. Given that, if you use a trigger, you revive and are back in the fight in under a second, that's 90 seconds of combat + 45 seconds of reviving = 2m 15s after first death to finish Tenzek... and leaving 45 of your own corpses next to him.
Granted, you solved that issue by suggesting the cooldown timer, but I still wanted to point out that the original objection to the original proposal was valid.
I reject your claim that nobody likes golding. I like golding. It's a substantial part of the game. You bother getting eq so that you can gold.
If you ONLY were PKing or doing RP combat you'd get one set of eq and be set for the entire boot (because, no matter how much you PK, you just won't get enough rounds in to use up your eq. ...ok, maybe you need a second weapon, but never ever a second set of armour.) and people would stop needing to quest gear at 1d uptime. Then the only PK that would happen would be between people who both know they're PKing and are both expecting something to happen -- a cock fight rather than a predator and prey relationship. Predator/prey is the fundamental dynamic of PVP interaction on this mud and always has been.
What activities do you think there are other than golding and things which support golding? Exploration? So you visit everywhere on the grid once and then are done and bored? RP? --I absolutely agree that this is a good thing, but look at the time distribution of people who no longer need gold -- how much time do they spend RPing? Playing Acro?
I mean, I'd really be interested in knowing what these activities that aren't related to golding or equipping are (which we're so badly missing out on because we're stuck hunting for gold). It's not like we're playing Diablo II where you get to level 60 then grind Baal 20,000 times. What kind of content do you enjoy?
Simply saying it doesn't mean it wouldn't work, I am saying that the entire act of making gold (which is what 50+% timewise of this game ends up boiling down to, inbeteen the fun parts) is ridiculously boring, which is why people make bots to do it, or automate as much of it as they can. Removing death penalites reduces the amount of gold required substantially.
Example, I ended up dying twice on Dracula due to badly timed ticks (why the hell should I have to count ticks to know if a quest I'm doing is going to change).
1. I killed the captain/lieutenant in the ranger camp, started the bone sword quest less than a minute later and suddenly they run in and spawn on me.
2. I had literally just killed the figure in that same camp, went inside to heal and got backstabbed to -4hp by the same figure I had just killed.
I took another death which was my own fault when hurricane dropped on me, so in the process of 2 hours or so of gameplay I had racked up costs of 12k to revel my stats/skills. Making that gold back is simply not fun, when I do (and it's rarely these days I'll admit) want to play, I want to enjoy the game, not grind out a bunch of gold so I can think about enjoying it.
This is one of the things Blizzard are realising, noone likes the grinds (especially not when you have to do it on multiple characters), so they're reducing them a lot (or making it so you can deliberately trade BoP items between your own account).
No death penalty wouldnt work in this game, if you want that, stay on WoW instead.
No, not really, and just think about it, how long would it take you to kill Tenzek (your example) doing it that way (no gear, first hit kills you), you're looking at a very long time and there's a rez right next to you, I don't think thats particularly abuse... If you were adamant you could put in a rez timer of sorts, you are unable to attack the mob who last killed you for 5 mins or something (You better rest up before attacking him again).
There are very simple ways of combatting the abuse (which, again I don't really see as a problem) you mention.
That mon was not meant for a level 1 to kill, and the logger had 0 commons. This would be like doing the same, but for Shelob as a maxed char.
For example (and this one was with regaining full HP each time):
http://logs.dyndns.dk/viewer.php/3057
Is it really abuse if it takes you 30+ minutes to do soemthing which would take 10 minutes normally, plus the chance of someone to come along and do the quest whilst you're screwing it up
As a maxed assassin I could usually get the first hit in against Tenzek. So 0hp would just mean that it'd require me to resurrect MANY more times to perform the abuse Shabba describes.
Shabba, if you revive with 1hp, 1ep from reviving, it is not abuseable in that way, and since it's not a big deal if you die again when you rez, the is no reason to make you rez with full HP, I believe I did mention that.
I'd probably stop bothering with ERs once they remove servants and the alignment shit.
I liked it with the old death costs. I thought it made the game more challenging and unique. It gave a sense of real danger when exploring. If we enter easy mode on the MUD with no death costs we'll just have easy mode players, and everybody's going to get bored fast (or else all turn to PK).
It's like using a game genie with some NES games. Sure, it's fun for a while.. but it's not the real game.
I suggested a system of slave-controlled mines at the T2T forum as an alternative gold zone for ERs but it'd take a massive amount of work. ERs don't like to kill their own kind, they just have to. In this MUD, anarchy and evil are assumed to be the same thing.
The alignment system change with the removal of servants was going to address this I think, and I think somebody in Valinor is still working on it. So we'll see about that in time. It'd be nice if moral - impartial - immoral aligned NPCs didn't affect your alignment at all. Those alignments had nothing to do with the war, they're civilians and animals. Or maybe have two alignments. Your war and moral stances.
maybe you could add a 2h delay between dying and reviving
No losses from death is too easily abused on this game. Say I want to kill Tenzek at boot or something...
kill tenzek
die
do s,nw,n,request revive,s,se,n,wield sword from corpse
repeat
my clan is going to save the mud. dont worry fellows
What about player houses which would be like guildhalls, only raidable at any time (kicks the player out and starts combat), robbable (essentially raiding, only you have a chance to fail; if you succeed you get to break into the person's house, wander around, loot anything you want -- though they can investigate the house for being robbed and have a good chance of getting a name or a lead for several days, perhaps a boot, with either lawlessness for the robber or large fines as the cost of being caught), expensiveish and with rent (like a guildhall) with possible purchasable upgrades which would make it harder to rob (eg buying an armed guard which must be killed before the place can be robbed or raided which costs an extra large amount of gold per month)?
I think that would be cool. It'd leave guilds unique (not raidable etc) and add a new dynamic to the game. Also, using lawlessness as a punishment for robbing a house would allow players to be infamous bandits/criminals who are to be hunted rather than go wanted in the current manner and be pretty much guaranteed to be arrested at some point.
That would be a mush-like mud... or maybe a mud-like mush.
While this isn't a solution to anything, I still would like to see T2T become more of a community with towns, cities and places where you can live. Give us something else to spend gold on besides leveling, EQ and fines.
Give us huts, shacks, houses, mansions, etc...they take upkeep, you can personalize, etc. And make guilds the same way...give people a place in a guild where they can build their 'quarters' or something.
I dunno...make it less about gold/eq/pk and more about being submerged into the world of Tolkien. Make long missions, that take weeks to solve.
Who knows.
WoW sucks now. A lot of the old players(me) don't like what it has become.
I'm not sure WoW is the paragon of success you make it out to be. I've seen what happens to people who play WoW a lot/are high levels, and I sincerely hope Towers doesn't do anything to foster that sort of player. I mean, everything people claim is true about the 'Herks' -- that's the AVERAGE WoW player.
Tireless, that argument was used in WoW many times, that the increased availability of gold was going to break the economy, it was going to do x, or y, it never has, you'd be surprised how resiliant economies are
However, if you were that worried about it, increase guild rents, innboxes, cart buying, foot costs, anything which goes directly to NPC's, it's not hard to increase sundry costs.
Thats kind of the point Brubaker, goldmaking is ridiculously boring. Lets say me and 3-4 friends want to kill Shelob, we've NEVER been before, we've just roughly heard of her. We go in, track her down, and end up all dying due to being unprepared. We now have to relevel (times 4), lets say we repeat this 4-5 times whilst we refine our tactic (not unhead of on WoW for someone to try a particularly challenging fight/aspect 400+ times). We're now level 15, and getting worse at hitting Shelob and as such are more likely to die. It'd be bad enough trying to get new healing, gear (maybe sometimes she eats a player and we have to re-gear him up as we can't get his gear from the place where she eats people), but all of that is doable. I'm also saying that you should maybe keep the level loss for 'highlevels', which are quite expensive to relevel (5k per trip I believe) and as such will make those painful, however you can do everything at lev 19 perfectly fine so you can test things out at level 19 fine.
Getting gold is boring, it's REALLY boring, it takes away from the fun aspects of the game, it's a grind, remember, this is supposed to be a game. Getting gold isn't hard, it's not challenging, it's just, purely boring.
Now, if someone wants to get into PKing they may have to deal with benig backhunted and dying, which is fine, however they're likely also going to end up with a bunch of fines, I'm ok with that too they can make the gold to pay those.
The other thing this gets around, is you no longer have to worry about stupid workaround systems like 'Blessing of Mandos' death becomes less of an issue, you can prevent people from instantly running and BSing the (now low) guy who killed them, by making them start with 0hp and 0ep, since if they got killed again they wouldn't lose anything, but they'd have to heal up first so they couldn't instantly get back into the battle. The game becomes a lot more 'fun'. The current trend on death has been to reduce it's cost anyway, less stat loss etc,I'm just saying, go the whole hog and remove it all.
Blizzard realised this quote a while ago, and have made making gold easier and easier in game (daily quests, daily dungeons, reducing material costs of consumables etc).
Agreed with Brubaker -- the gold economy might not be ideal, but it's how the mud was designed. You can't change it without breaking the mud.
Removing death cost would totally imbalance economics of game. I mean, most of gold is spent on relevelling, if you didn't had to spend that gold and was bored and went golding, you would have enough gold to level up your friend's char untill the mud has died out.
If I were an admin I would, Sunflash. I totally would. But I'm only a mod and, as far as I can tell, Nicuramar has fallen off the face of the earth. I haven't tried to contact him lately, but I tried for a few months and got no responses a while ago.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Offtopic, XKCD is relevant to the mud today :)
http://xkcd.com/712/
Ontopic, sure the mud is declining, and various people have their own opinions about it. I may as well give mine (or at least part of it).
Almost every single innovative (ie, interesting) idea eventually gets removed.
Packmobs, removed from Far Harad (Correct solution IMO, spending the same amount of time adding some to West Arda to prevent the FR complaining)
Bolas, removed (Correct solution IMO, making them work like hamstring, instead of breaking do)
Caltrops, removed (Correct solution IMO, changing how they work, making it so 75% of the time they merely cause the hunter to use more EP hunting, and only 5% break the hunt, 20% of the time they cause the runner to hamstring themselves)
Ambush, removed, (I know it was actually just hide + backstab and as such could still 'technically' be accomplished, but the combination of the two did create an innovative and new gameplay element, Correct solution IMO, instead of preventing you from ambushing someone you're in combat with, simply stop the damage part from happening and allow the hunt part to continue)
Stopgap Camps, nerfed to oblivion (gold value reduced drastically), made into the lev 15 quest (which made them really annoying to find when you wanted to do it) and as such became really annoying. (The original idea for these camps was that they would become the main 'golding' places for ER's, wih plenty of gold/sellable items in them, and as such be worth finding. Once you'd clear a camp and everyone left it, it would close up, and eventually a new one would spawn elsewhere. They would also be randomly created (layout wise as well as position on the grid).
I'm sure there are a bunch of other things which are innovative, but instead of fixing or addressing the issues they seem to prefer to remove them and focus on simply creating new items (same old with new emotes/descriptions usually, and even if it does have a new mechanic it's not like you get to see it, it'll usually boil down to a double hit type thing).
On that note, there is a huge amount of stuff on the mud that there just isn't any incentive to do (other than for the experience once maybe), the 'quests tracker' is a good idea as it'll allow people to do some quests. There was a sort of achivement tracker in the form of the custom description lines you got from some quests, although these would have made descriptions unbearably long if you added them for many more quests, perhaps (yeah I know everyone else does it) adding some sort of 'achivements' command where those kind of things go would work.
Also to revisit it, I'm sure a lot of people don't like PK because it's a very steep learning curve (if you're not careful you're gonna end up dying a lot, and for an inexperienced player that can take a lot to recover from. Noone minds experimenting on Wow (witness the people who tried to 3man Onyxia at 60, or similar things which take hundreds of attempts), because the death cost is low enough not to worry about. Losing your gear is annoying, but recoverable given time, restoring XP/stats/skills is a time consuming, boring activity. There's a reason in WoW that they target max level chars for all the new content, they expect people to eventually get to that level and therefore they want to provide the most content for that level. Perhaps one way around it would be to make it such that you only lose XP/stats that are >19 (ie, if you're 20+ you would lose stats/xp, but only down to the 100 level min). People would then be more inclined to try stuff out, experiment with things. Lots of people don't like going to Shelob because they'll likely die the first few times trying it whilst learning the techniques and tactics, I know that I have never killed her on any char mainly for that reason, I can't do it alone and people don't want to risk dying. The mud would certainly be a lot more fun (for me) if I could focus on trying stuff out, exploring dangerous areas.
Also, whilst I'm on the subject of death, since I've had to do this a number of times for people, I believe our current death/resurrection system may put a lot of newer players off. At some point everyone dies (especially whilst you're levelling up). Once you're dead you no longer have access to comms, tells, you can't see who you're talking to, you can't use travelto's, I've had to hand walk several inexperienced players to the nearest graveyard/healer on numerous occasions. In (yes bringing it up again) WoW, you get automatically transported to the nearest graveyard and you can amke your way back to your corpse for less of a loss, tbh I think this makes a lot more sense for the mud too, go to graveyard, you quickly res there and then you have to get back to your corpse to collect any gear you had, it simply isn;t fun (lets say someone died miles away from the graveyard in the middle of the grid) spending 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get back alive, I wonder how many people ahve simply quit the game over that?
On a seperate issue, I realised why half of the goldmaking areas for ER's didn't work out too well, and why everyone pelted (thereby giving the impression that pelting was far better than anything else, and eventually getting packmobs removed). What happened is that a good proportion of the ER community didn't want to spend their time killing Orcs, Numenoreans and what would appear to be fellow ER's (witness how many people were quite happy killing the rangers), and as such the only alternative was pelting (which was pretty good gold). Now some of the power players wouldn't have cared, but a lot of the time when you see everyone else doing something you assume it's the best way of doing it.
'Wtf are you guys talking about? There's 2500 herks on the MUD, 2400 of them are Exhalev and he's just multiboxing that shit. For fuck's sake.'
You need to put in signatures on the logpage, Tireless, so that I can set my sig to 'The MUD has over 5000 active accounts, with close to 1000 unique logins a day. - Mathias'
<3
'Depends on how conservative you are when doling out the titles. If you're very conservative about it there can be as for as 4 or so of them, while on the more liberal end there are more like 50 or 60.'
Wtf are you guys talking about? There's 2500 herks on the MUD, 2400 of them are Exhalev and he's just multiboxing that shit. For fuck's sake.
I'll take Draimons word for it. Because Draimon is an owner.
Draimon says in Westron: when i revive
Draimon says in Westron: ill want an autograph
*Draimon leaps up and grabs a root then climbs out of the pit.
this mud doesn't really have chance to grow, not with such playerbase and such ainu
I am not looking forward to that.
Pvp flag will change it all. Herks will leave the mud. And so will many others. Put it out of its misery. :P
But conservatives suck, so it's around 50-60 then.
Depends on how conservative you are when doling out the titles. If you're very conservative about it there can be as for as 4 or so of them, while on the more liberal end there are more like 50 or 60.
300-400 at least. multiplying by 15 per day
how many of these so-called 'herks' are there?
'When they massively abused the shit out of obvious bugs they got nuked. Sometimes hardbanned. When herks abuse shit, it gets changed to be less abusable, and herks get off scot-free, and the multiplaying rules have been all but thrown out the window to encourage their behavior and keep them in-game.'
Well said.
The point I was making about the contract, Darrick, is that you had done something to somebody that was bad enough they wanted you dead. Not everyone who is offended will step up and say 'You offended me. I'mma keel u now.' I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a random kill. Maybe an under-justified kill in your eyes, but then, people get killed for reasons they think are stupid all the time. I mean, shit, I killed Link/Kagan (pre and post namechange) 3 or 4 times because he insulted Olembe and Tuomas. (and, if I start PKing again, I'mma kill him 2 or 3 more times if he's still around.)
And I am in complete agreement with you on that post, Sunflash. (Yes, I have been around for about 5 years -- a little more, but close enough) -- Valinor SHOULD be enforcing the rules regarding the Herks and are not. This is a subject on which I feel anger towards Valinor is justified. That doesn't detract from my belief that they are justified in enforcing the lesser rules. Even if the police are bribed into letting a killer get away, that doesn't invalidate their authority to give speeding tickets.
Tireless, how many years have you been here again? Like 5? Your understanding appears to be flawed. This mud has always had a certain sect of players that were the hellraising pk-mongers that the Herks have taken the role of, sure. From Klokers to Cubans, we've seen it all. Here's the thing though, unless they were ainu alts, none of those groups got coddled. When they massively abused the shit out of obvious bugs they got nuked. Sometimes hardbanned. When herks abuse shit, it gets changed to be less abusable, and herks get off scot-free, and the multiplaying rules have been all but thrown out the window to encourage their behavior and keep them in-game.
As an example, I gave someone a couple of riddle hints on the level 5 quest in like 1999 or 2000 or something and got nuked for it, no warnings, Aule just straight up nuked me. There's got to be a line that you don't cross. On one hand you've been defending Valinor in these threads telling us how they're just the law enforcers making sure that we don't violate those rules, yet in example after example we see them clearing making exceptions and letting laws slide. T2T is garbage. Support the movement, quit T2T, escape the shitbags.
My contract isn't from them, Tireless. My contract was placed by Eaoden for calling him out over killing someones horses. And yeah, I remember Trenchant, I killed him for killing newbies and the log is still up I believe. The difference is that the attitude displayed by he and others was a minority back then, and as such it could be dealt with. Nowadays it seems to be the majority and many players from the old school of thought have left, leaving a diminished environment for all. In short, the game has grown one way and I have grown another and it isn't a compatible path for us to walk together anymore. I'm not what I was back then and I have the stones to admit it and move on. I just think it's sad to see how much this place has spiralled into the depths since '05 or so. I wish you all the best and the MUD that I enjoyed from '00-'05. I just don't see it ever going back to the way things used to be. Growing up sucks. :(
If you earned a contract, it wasn't a random kill. Calling someone a herk on the comm is definitely adequate to earn a death afaik. There have always been people who pulled that kind of thing (Remember Trenchant? Dighi?) and it's a little insulting to suggest that the mud is different and worse now because we have the same problems we always have, but from different people.
That said, if you're not having fun here, I'm glad you've got the discipline to walk away. More players on Towers is better for the game, but your life (happiness, etc) is far more important than the game ever will be.
I fucked up as I said and it shows a random kill. I didn't break because I'd lose my party and I figured they'd kill her if they couldn't get me. I was killed for 'trash talking on comm'. The extent of my trash talking was calling Aether a Herk and saying I was friends with Myrddin. I'm also curious if something has changed with the lawsys since I played last. Aether got reported for attempt, went wanted, then it came back and said he was found not guilty. Is this normal, or is this class act just abusing another bug? Regardless, I've had quite enough now. This place is no longer fun the way it was 10-5 years ago. It doesn't help that I've grown up and the game has changed dramatically. On top of it all it seems to be played by a group of typists dedicated to a virtual dick measuring contest and no rp whatsoever. I suppose I should stfu and go cry some more, but until something changes, this place is pretty much just a cesspool now. Like Pounder said 'WELCOME TO HERKIE MUD! Wat your name? Wat your pass? Come halp us!' Seeya Arda, it used to be fun.
Subpar log. Should have at least made an effort instead of showing us how much you suck.
Hey Darrick hibernated.... GB isn't driving away typists guys.... heh
Two people with that EQ was a nice amount seeing as you were nearly perfect shape at Linhir, but I am curious why GB would kill you to begin with.
this log is gayer than christmas.
I... what? Why would you post a log of you getting attacked at perfect and standing there to die? O.o
I am amazed at the n00bness all around in this log. Myself included. I shouldn't have let my hands get full and then dropped the wrong damn sword. Props to Aether for the worst timing ever, but with that kind of firepower I didn't have much of a chance once I decided to fight instead of break. Until next time boys.