I just want to play the game.
I have never enjoyed PvP in muds. Ever. I just want to RP, fight mobs, do space stuff. No other game looks as promising.
Am I wasting my time waiting for StarMourn?
Will I actually see RP, because I didn't really see much of anyone interacting anymore on Achaea as when I first joined?
Are people going to hunt me ruthlessly just because I don't want to PvP?
Are ships actually going to be viable to all players?
Is it going to be all pay to win like the other IRE games?
Is it going to be as PvP, clan based, and metagamed as Achaea?
I hated how all your players told me my character wouldn't amount to shit just because I chose sword and shield spec on a knight.
Am I wasting my time waiting for StarMourn?
Will I actually see RP, because I didn't really see much of anyone interacting anymore on Achaea as when I first joined?
Are people going to hunt me ruthlessly just because I don't want to PvP?
Are ships actually going to be viable to all players?
Is it going to be all pay to win like the other IRE games?
Is it going to be as PvP, clan based, and metagamed as Achaea?
I hated how all your players told me my character wouldn't amount to shit just because I chose sword and shield spec on a knight.
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Comments
2. Plenty of people interact with each other in Achaea. You have to look for interactions, not wait for them to arrive in your door neatly packed.
3. Unlikely. Much like people don't get hunted ruthlessly in any of the other IRE games just for not wanting to pvp
4. That seems to be one of the goals, from what has been stated
5. It seems like it'll be less pay-to-win, at the very least, from what some Admins have said.
6. Probably. People metagame in all muds, or really, in mostly all games. And if you think they don't then lol
As for the sword and shield thing, it really does suck for hunting. Thats just the way of it. The only reason to pick that spec is for pvp and you don't sound like you like pvp so people might have been doing you a favour really.
Have looked, haven't found.
It was an ascetic, and they pretty much told me it was completely useless even from an RP standpoint. That even as a choice of ascetic (I told them it didn't bother me to take a slower path) that 90% of my class used one spec and that anything else was detrimental to the class, period.
You come at me sideways, and still I will rise above.
My purist question is indefensibly going to be, will I be able to find people that both wish to RP and dungeon crawl?
The metagame is inconsequential to it. I came to enjoy myself and not really worry about how other people are trying to break the game.
And yes, I have played games where Metagaming was against the rules in all manners. And it worked out better than okay. It was great. Your character had growth, and the people deserving of the higher end skills, abilities, stats, and equipment earned them. Instead of creating a character with an obscene stat level that ate the entire game.
There are games that are better without Metagaming. Period. Your attempt to harm me with words will find no ground here. Education and Knowledge will always beat prudential behavior.
I can definitively say that at least one person who wants to RP/dungeon crawl without focusing heavily on PvP will exist in Starmourn. I am interested in RPing and dungeon crawling and while I'm not opposed to PvP, I strongly suspect it won't be one of my areas of primary focus. That said, I've never played an IRE game before so maybe I'll end up falling in love with the PvP system (unlikely, just isn't my style usually). My main interest is definitely role play and PvE though.
Yikes. I realize I don't know you at all, and I'm certainly not attempting to bash or judge, but you seem kind of primed to be defensive. I'm sure you have your reasons for that, but, I will say that in my experience, if you go into a situation looking for something hard enough, you'll find it. From what I have experienced in my limited time in the community, I haven't found anyone who seemed unreasonably excited about attacking other players OOCly or ICly. Unless there is a significant amount of missing context, I don't think @Arsentar was trying to bash you or twist the meaning of your post.
There's a pretty big variety of reasons for why that could be. Time zones, group dynamics (some places are just better for rp than others). I've seen times where there's near constant rp everywhere and others where it's just staying in character.
I mean, aesthetic choices are fair. Though you do also note that you don't want to PVP, like... in Lusternia hexes is literally completely useless to someone that doesn't want to PVP and making that choice says something about a character, i.e they're someone who wants to fight and kill adventurers. Also balancing specs can be hard, so it's entirely possible that what those people said was the truth?
You will likely find people that want to do just about anything you want to do in game... anything... (poor Lusternian gods and their fulcruxes)
Metagaming as far as the context of IREs tends to really focus around out of character knowledge/communication, Lusternia has the batphone concept of skyping/discording allies into a fight that you'd lose without them for example.
The metagaming you discuss is pretty limited in IREs as far as I'm aware because it's not super game breaking, stuff tends to pretty well available or a credit purchase.
Also, as @Bandus said, no one has attacked you, they have just answered your questions. If you like we can start talking in drag race gifs?
As an aside, you should have named this thread "Achaea sucks and I hate it"
** Editing to add that I'm not as closely connected to the combat meta on the other games, so there may be some overpowered arefacts on other games that do throw off the combat balance there.
I will say that arties HELP you win, but without proper skill to back them up they're just flashier versions of forged.
In regards to SnB. You have to take everything with a grain of salt and do your own testing. Yes it's slower, but it's not arduously so. I got to dragon with SnB and I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed running around with a tower shield taking less damage than everyone. Was it slower? Probably yes, but I loved it. Sometimes I'd dual tower shield and decay something really big.
You can't let those comments get you down, and you should inherently mistrust anything said second-hand. Do your own testing and see what you like.
I've found that skill 9/10 is the deciding factor in combat. Artefacts certainly help but don't make as big a difference as people think they do.
As in everything else in life, you will always find negative people who are just angry and want to hurt other people. Hopefully they will be at a minimum in Starmourn and you're able to find others who are not. Let me encourage you not to have the attitude of those. It'll attract other positive people if you're positive too.
I hope our player base will do the best we can. The reality is that the admin can only do so much policing and guiding. The players still have a lot of control over themselves and their interactions so we all need to work on being the kind of people that create an enjoyable experience.
Allow me to welcome you to the community!
Jin
VOTE FOR STARMOURN
if there's no kittens in space
I'm going on a rampage
TectonToday at 2:17 PM
They're called w'hoorn, Groot
sets out a saucer of milk
2. If this is going to be anything like MKO, if you have an interesting RP idea you should be able to find people to roleplay with you. In particular, I am generally happy to roleplay with anyone with an interesting idea. I also tend to come up with a fair number of ideas of my own of varying quality. The problem occurs when everyone at all interested in roleplaying are all simultaneously completely out of ideas, which is when I take a break from the game.
3. Probably not. The occasional person will attack you unprovoked if you run into them, but people generally don't bother tracking down and killing non-combatants unless their roleplay has caused them to be really controversial (I had such an alt, it was quite interesting playing as her), and most people should leave you mostly alone.
4. It sounds like it should be quite easy to afford at least one ship. I'm wondering a bit about how much a ship would suck to replace, though
5. I would generally call IRE games pay for sanity at worst, since you can get yourself to a competitive point eventually without paying money, just a matter of how long that will take and whether you will be one of the best warriors or just an average warrior. And if you don't plan on PvPing, you shouldn't need to worry about it.
6. Metagaming definitely happens in many games, and I doubt this will be an exception, though it should be fairly controlled. Hopefully we don't have the whole pro-strip mining campaign or the like (briefly in MKO there was a fairly forceful movement to get everyone to mine everything, rather than just the stuff they actually wanted, do to OOC theories about how mineral resetting worked, which I vehemently opposed and resisted, and found evidence to dispute said theories through a few careful studies of my own, though this whole issue seemed rather isolated and most people seemed unaware that any such thing had occurred). PvP also happens, but we do have a fair number of roleplayers lurking around the forums, so should probably be a decent mix. I doubt clans will be as big of a thing as in some games, since it doesn't seem like the classes are tied to any such, and without that a city should be able to cater to your needs.
That's part of the reason I'm so stoked for this game, actually. In the others, launch or soon afterward was the only time it was actually reasonable to grind up the gold enough for credits in-game, due to creditflation and skill bloat and such. I don't hear about anyone farming enough gold to gain even all their guild skills anymore, and some classes require even more than that.
Will there be players who attack without reason? Unfortunately, probably. But they tend to end up far more the hunted than the hunter.
If you're not into PvP, even in Achaea, you have far less need of spending money. That being said, when I play a game for a conservative estimate of 40 hours per month, and enjoy myself, I have no problem paying a $25 subscription fee for some bonuses along with the occasional extra purchase.
Batphoning people is one thing since I can justify that as just waking someone up with tells as mental communication, or getting people to show up for rp or something. But other forms of it are just ridiculous; we are not our characters.
It may happen whether we like it or not but accepting it as a fact of life isn't the answer.
If you're talking about voice comms during raids and such -- it is a simple reality of life... Most convenient + responsive form of communication wins...
Now if you mean like someone gets ahold of an RP log or something, and takes that information as IC character knowledge... yes, screw those people. xP
My experience in IRE combat is definitely limited, but here's my two cents on it. Suppose you're fighting with a scripted set of defences. These can be the default autocuring, default with some additions and tweaks by yourself, or an entire system like the one you mention. Your opponent has one of these three as well. You notice that after you hit one limb, they immediately move to parry that limb. So if you hit head twice, only the first would connect as they'd reflexively parry the second.
So you modify your strategy. Instead of hitting head twice and arms twice, you alternate one head and one arm attack. You modified your offence on the fly in response to the defensive trend you saw. I think that's a very basic, simple example of skill?
On another note, skill could also just mean the prep before combat--going in with the right plan to execute a series of attacks that takes advantage of a common defensive vulnerability. Maybe the default system is bad at curing ____, so you prepare an offence that relies on ____ stacking or whatever. A different kind of skill.
Or maybe I'm clueless, and at your level of experience it does boil down to 90% scripted interactions. Hopefully that's not the case.
I think of it kinda like the meta of a card game.
If a particular system becomes widespread then people will start to learn how it works and who is using it.
So combatants start to shift to focus on defeating that system, either by knowing how it will respond to certain things and attacking appropriately or by exploiting flaws in its coding (like I vaguely remember mentions of Lusternian systems not being able to handle certain afflictions at different times.)
Of course, it can end up with people doing classleads or envoys (formal process to ask the admin to change stuff in the game for people new to IRE) to make their class better suited to the meta.
Realistically, I think you notice this sort of thing maybe during the fight but probably later reading logs and adapt your strategy for next time.
Word is, Starmourn is trying to build a combat system that isn't as reliant on triggers as other IRE games. I definitely hope they succeed. I'd much rather combat be based around strategic, in the moment choices rather than who has scripted the best combat bot.
That said, nobody has ever fully automated Achaea's combat. They've automated parts of it, but offense is very hard to automate well, particularly when you include movement into there. Were people to put even close to the kind of expertise and resources into automating Achaea's combat as they have with chess or go though, I'm positive they'd succeed. Not very far in the future, AI is going to be better at all games barring games like Diplomacy that rely on free-form communication. (Of course, eventually AI will be better at those too, but that's a lot further off.)
So, we'll see how it goes with Starmourn. We definitely hope we've made it more resistant to gaining advantages via scripting, but we'll see!
Like you mentioned, though, the expected changes in Starmourn combat vs. other IRE would be extremely welcome by many of us.
Aurelius said: This is an awesome goal to set for the game and I look forward to seeing its execution.