pwipe date?

[el conquistador]

any chance we could get a time estimate until the next pwipe?

im all amped up to get reincarnated but i dont want to burn out right before the wipe.  like if its going to be in two weeks ill save up all my mudding energy.  but if its not for another 2 months i want to get on there and see how far i can get. 
stuck in limbo right now cant decide if i should play or not play!

[el conquistador]

no one knows?  or its a secret?

[wilbon]

any chance we could get a time estimate until the next pwipe?

im all amped up to get reincarnated but i dont want to burn out right before the wipe.  like if its going to be in two weeks ill save up all my mudding energy.  but if its not for another 2 months i want to get on there and see how far i can get. 
stuck in limbo right now cant decide if i should play or not play!

my best guess is not in 2019.  there is just so much to do: druid nerf, exotic nerf, reduce base stats to account for reincarnation, cleric buff, class sets.  i'm just making this up though, i dont know anything.

[Willoe]

Wilbon:
It's funny but you're probably right! The unfortunate thing is that none of these changes are things that actually will get people excited to come at p-wipe. Sure the p-wipe itself will attract some folks to come back(hopefully) but that won't last long. I really hope the administration starts to tackle and focus on changes that the players are actually asking for instead of some random stat buffing/nerfing that nobody cares about:
-Make questing a group thing
-Make most gear unlimited(we have such limited time to play as an aging player base, nobody wants to spend their time repopping gear)
-Remove rank caps
-Stop nerfing stuff, who cares if its a little OP if folks are having fun? It's not like theirs any PVP happening anymore?
-Speaking of which, PVP will obviously take some coding, but this needs to be addressed.

I love this game, and really hope folks come back to play it, however I can't even see myself playing until the administration starts to focus on things that players actually want vs some random crap nobody cares about. Focus on keeping players, see what it would take to get players to come back. We are NOT a growing community, we are not going to attract "new" players". Our customer base is our existing player base and those who still come back and read these forums. All attention should be focused on attracting old/existing players to come back.

My 2 cents!

[Bugg]

-Make most gear unlimited(we have such limited time to play as an aging player base, nobody wants to spend their time repopping gear)

Remove decay timers, it has always been bullshit. I understand maybe it could be a balance mechanism when we had tons of players and too little equipment. Now it is the opposite. If you want to tweak equipment circulation, you already have the rent cost system. Maybe make rent costs exponential in time to encourage people to log in and prevent deep-renting. If you don't log often enough to pay for it, you don't deserve it. And certainly will prevent having 2-3 sets worth of gear on the same char. But if you do play enough, you can enjoy your hard-earned gear without fearing decay.

About limit-less gear. I am not necessarily in favour.. there is just so much equivalent gear/sets that you can use. Having some limit forces one to either kill for it (not always a bad thing!), or solve another zone to pop some equivalent piece of gear. It encourages creativity to build different sets of gear, else everyone would have the same ultra-optimized set.

[Willoe]

Bugg - No limits, no decay...All the same purpose to help people with limited play time. I'm definitely in support of not having decays on MOST item's other than the game changing ones(nobashes/orbs/etc).

[Jorquin]

Disagree. No decays but most gear still limited would be horrible.

At a pwipe, this just benefits people with no job or familiar obligations. Later, it promotes trash pkilling and hiding real eq in rent. Both are bad outcomes. Limited equipment and the decay system are, in my opinion, joined at the hip.

You could remove item limits and keep the decay system, if load rates were adjusted accordingly.... but that just transfers frustrations. Regular repop efforts due to decay would be replaced with difficulty repopping specific items due to lower load rates.

There's difficulties with both approaches. Both could work, or be awful. The devil is in the detail around how mechanics actually work.

[Vasagh]

My suggestion:

Remove item limits (with few exceptions) and remove rent-decay on these unlimited items but leave the normal (in-game) decay rate and item load rates.
This means you have to work a bit to maintain a set but it alleviates the pain or the urgency required to re-pop items or lose them. This also means the least amount of changes.

Removing decay completely isn't a good idea, here is why:
. The amount of items circulating will keep increasing as the wipe gets older
. It would require reducing load rates to combat the above to some degree (less fun)
. Less incentive to revisit zones you've already done and got your items from
. Less incentive for people to learn to pop items on their own, once they are handed an item, bought, traded or pkilled for
. etc

[Willoe]

Perhaps I was to hasty in my response so I'll elaborate.

Decays - I think it's really important to look at our aging player base and understand that we have less time to play as we get older. I know a lot of people in CORE/people I've played with over the years can't stand logging on to just chase their decays day after day. I've even had some people who have normally been exploring new content with me not even bother exploring because they are constantly chasing decays. Eventually they get bored and quit. Knowing that our player base is not young kids like we used to be, with limited time, we need to have a system that doesn't penalize those that can't log on every day for hours at a time.

I think that a combination of no-decay/unlimited items for basics should be considered(ie decent weps, autofly, nocharm, npp). These are the basics people need to zone and they should be able to log on whenever they want to do so without having to go and repop these items.

Limited items - Unless you are a dragon orb, nobash, game changing item. Who cares? Why not let everyone have a spiked wrist buckler, or an ashen stone ring? What is the purpose of these limits? Damage rings/wrists are a dime a dozen so why try to even limit them?

Rent Decay - Look to penalize those that deep-rent, I like the idea of rent being more expensive the longer you stay in rent. If you log on daily, you shouldn't have things decay while you aren't on.

Anyway. Thank you to those who have given input. Hope more people add to this thread.

Ilya

[el conquistador]

i think the idea behind the faster decay times was to give people something to do and to keep items circulating a bit.  it is definitely not very fun to log on and see 3 or 4 items are gone but the item circulation plan was working somewhat.  i did see a couple of items this wipe that i usually dont see but it was rare.  and on decay they were instantly gone again.  people seem to keep pretty good tabs on their stuff.  i wouldnt be surprised if some of the high end players had decay calendars set up.

 i would be in favor of no decay no limit items with a much lower load rate.  it would add a lot of excitement to the game for me if every zone had a chance to load any of its items.  or slower decay and much higher rent costs would be a good alternative too.  it also sucks to deadbeat but at least then its your own fault.  i can rent a pretty decent set of items for less than 3k.  thats a joke to anyone who is really playing.  i could probably make 50k in a day if i worked at it and i am not a strong player.

[Willoe]

Reason you are seeing items you haven't seen before is due to lack of players. Lots of players have quit over this rent decay system alone. Circulation of gear shouldn't be at the cost of our very limited player base.

[Alecto]

anything less than 3d6 (3d5, 2d8, 4d4, and lower) should be no_decay and unlimited, although a slight reduction in load% would be fine to offset the fact that those things last forever, make them all super expensive to repair though, so damage is a thing. Don't want to drop 5k to repair it? trash it and load a new one.

Any easy load +dam (i'm looking at you, spiked wrist buckler) should have corresponding negatives (-hr, -dex, etc.) but be no_limit and no_decay but also have a reduction in load % (like 10%) ditto with repair costs for those items.

Anything that's really nice should be limited, and I think we need to stagger rent_Decay rate based on time since wipe: at start of wipe currently decay rate is fine, double the length after 3 months, quadruple it after 6 months, reward the year-long players

[reed23]

Jorquin "... and it promotes trash pkilling...."

It shows just how out of touch you are with this game.  Don't put in BS opinions unless you are going to familiarize yourself with the current state of the game.

I agree with most of Ilya's points.

[Kadaj]

It shows just how out of touch you are with this game.  Don't put in BS opinions unless you are going to familiarize yourself with the current state of the game.

I don't think that statement should be directed at Jorquin, but it definitely should be directed at someone.

[Terk]

For some historical context:

At some point we removed tons of item limits and tinkered with load % downward. Personally, I loved this approach, because you could slowly build up reserves of items and you would find stuff in zones constantly, even if you didn’t expect it. Once items decayed you’d generally have a replacement if you were active which you could store in the vault.

I remember there was backlash from it, though. People didn’t like everyone running around in an armaboro set with mithril bracelets and having 80%-90% of the power of more hardcore players. Maybe there was more trash PK? Maybe it made better individual items feel less valuable? I’m sure there was some reason we shifted backward, but I have trouble remembering now.

I generally think that there should be readily accessible paths for solo players to get to 80-90% of the hardest core players (if that exists anymore), so they can do zones casually and not have to worry about gear so much. I’ll admit that this was a bias to my preferred play style, and at this point in my life I can’t really see being able to play again. Any game I can’t accomplish the majority of daily activities within 30 minutes during the week and an hour to two on the weekends is a challenge to work into modern life.