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Subject: "Fixing" Asheron's Call
Yeah, it's getting fixed all right, just like I got my dog fixed last week.
To July 2002 update and progress report
To October 2002 update and progress report
To February 2003 update and progress report
To March 2004 update and progress report
To January 2005 update and progress report (Monday Morning Quarterbacking because, I'm now out.)
These are some suggestions improving the playability of Asheron's Call. Playability is the "human side" of AC, not the technical side.
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I and my three associates are old hands at multi-player games. We all played Asheron's Call in beta, and bought the commercial version the first week it came out. We play Starcraft and Balder's Gate, we played Command HQ in the eighties, and we've played D&D since the seventies. One of us writes game reviews for Computer Gaming World, and all of us have built many D&D scenarios. In short, we love multiplayer games; we want to see more and better multi-player games come to market, and we know what makes a good, playable game.
_________
I and my three associates have been playing Asheron's Call since mid-beta, and we applaud the original designers for creating a technological tour-de-force: No where have we seen a system which allows so many people to play together in such a rich terrain with such great graphics. In these areas Asheron's Call is truly ground breaking and breathtaking. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, and the place we see the most need for improvement right now is in playability -- the human side of AC. The technological platform has been built, now the playability issues must be addressed.
We are distressed to see that playability is being controlled by "whiners", not by people quietly enjoying the game. We have been quietly enjoying the game, mastering the environment put before us. We have been distressed to see that the many playability changes made during beta, and since then, have been to appease whiners. And those who whine most vociferously run melee fighter-type characters who would thrive in Doom/Quake environments -- fast, intense melee situations, and nothing else. The game has drifted from being a game where many playing styles can thrive (fighter, mage, archer, artisan, and tradeoffs between armor and speed) into one in which only heavily armored "hack and slash" melee fighters can thrive. Asheron's Call is not becoming more lively for us, it's becoming duller as our more interesting characters, the non-meleeing magi and archers, are steadily "nerfed" (reduced in power).
Further, as the whiners have advanced in level, they have persuaded Turbine Designers to "toughen up" Dereth to accommodate them. This has dried up the entertainment value of playing low levels in Dereth, and is cutting off "new blood" -- new players who would be interested if the system was easier to master. Dereth is now a very tough world for a beginner to master.
We have seen this collection of symptoms before... many times. We see it when an enthusiastic beginning dungeon master announces, "I've built a dungeon and I want you guys to try it out!" We do, and being somewhat experienced at this concept of fantasy role playing, we quickly find things to do in his or her world that the DM hadn't anticipated.
This is when the DM's mettle is tested. A mature and entertaining DM will adapt to the players' taking him "off course" by adapting his or her world within the framework of rules he or she has already set up. An immature DM will panic and start changing the rules -- which frustrates both the DM and the players.
When the beginning DM sees his or her favorite monsters getting bypassed or unexpectedly beaten, he or she will try to force the players back "on track." The panic is displayed as sudden ad hoc changes to the playing framework or introducing a "dux a machina" to "save" the situation. When it becomes obvious that the DM is forcing play to proceed in a certain fashion, we as players get annoyed. We tell the DM, "You've got a good start, but the world needs some work."
This is what we see happening to Asheron's Call. The designers seem to have in mind a "right way" to play AC, and if we players find unexpected ways to play and exploit the system, we are "abusing the system", and we must be "corrected." An example of this is level restricting dungeons. There is a "proper level" for a dungeon? What problem is caused by a low level character wandering into a dungeon filled with high level monsters?
Prescribing how we should play is not good. We players get annoyed and lose interest. If you want to keep our interest you need to add to the playability of the game, not take away from it. We are telling Turbine Designers, "You've got a good start, but it needs some work."
Your efforts to "balance" the game and "end abuse" are producing a bland, vanilla product. You are acting as if there is only one right way to "win" at AC -- an "it's my way or the highway" attitude. We have watched unarmed combat, life magi, archers and others get penalized. The feeling we get is that the tweaking won't stop until heavily-armored "tank" swordsmen are the characters who prosper in all circumstances, because, according to the whiners, those are the characters who "should win."
The biggest sufferer in this "end abuse" campaign has been "heroic action". When there is only one way to do something, there can be no "heroes" who figure out exceptional ways to accomplish the goal. Cutting out heroic action cuts large chunks out of AC's entertainment value.
Those are our general complaints, here are some of the specifics.
Here are the specifics:
Note: these specifics use the "Lugian Hill" area north of Qualaba'r as the example piece of geography -- this is the "above ground dungeon" building on the road near Lugian Outpost dungeon. We will also be referring to Crude Monogua Hill: the abandoned hilltop town east of Zaikhal that has been overrun by Crude Monoguas, and Black Spawn Den, the tusker-filled dungeon near Ayan Baqur.
My friends and I got into the beta when "Lugian Hill" was in full flower: player corpses could be looted by other players and every Lugian carried a very heavy but very valuable weapon as part of it's treasure.
Lugian Hill was at that time an interesting place to play because it supported an "ecosystem" of players. Lugian Hill was interesting because it was a rich, rich source of experience points (XP) and treasure. It produced just what this game should be about:
This ecosystem was broken up when whiners complained. First the whiners complained that looters were taking unfair advantage by looting "their" corpses, and later they complained that life magi were taking unfair advantage getting too much XP.
From the start the concept of "fixing" the abuses at Lugian Hill was a bad idea. If lots of people are playing there, they are playing there because they like what's happening. What should have been the designer's goal for playability was making more Lugian Hill-like places elsewhere in Dereth, not nerfing Lugian Hill. These other places would be places where specific mixes of characters were likely to prosper. Some places would favor mixes of magi and archers, some mixes of warriors and healers, and so on.
That there should be places where players prosper should not be looked upon as "abuse" -- that's first level DM thinking. Producing thriving ecosystems of players should be viewed as the playability goal, not an abuse to be stamped out. Ecosystems are what massive multiplaying can do that no other playing environment can.
We feel that those of us who are taking the time to master the skills of playing magi and lightly armored, fast, non-sword fighters are being penalized. Wearing heavy armor and standing toe-to-toe with a monster should not be the one and only "Turbine approved" way of killing monsters, but it feels like it is.
Example: Whiners complaining that magi can prosper by killing things through walls, and Turbine Designers responding by nerfing life spells to "end this abuse".
How Turbine Designers expect to end this complaint and still have a functioning mage character is a mystery. The whiners won't stop complaining until all magi go toe-to-toe with monsters the same as melee fighters do. Yet, how is this expectation possible? At birth magi must sacrifice their strength, coordination and speed to beef up their spell casting attributes, focus and self. It makes no sense to expect to see a heavily armored mage (requiring high strength) dodging monster swings (requiring high quickness and coordination) while he or she casts lots of powerful spells at the monster (requiring high focus and self). To do that every attribute must be high. What has happened to the tradeoff concept?
The "proper concept" (from FRP lore) is that magi are supposed to be lightly armored spell casters standing behind heavily armored fighters. But this concept only works if the fighters can protect the spell casters. Yet Turbine Designers have made "sticky monsters" who can catch running magi and have not provided any way for melee fighters to stop a charging monster from sliding by them to reach the mage... So of course magi will hide behind walls! The whiners and Turbine Designers can't win this one, but magi are certainly losing.
Suggestion here: if the "enemy priority list" of monsters is changed so that melee damagers get higher priority than spell damagers, then monsters will turn on the melee fighters, and the melee fighters can "protect" the magi -- as the "fighter in front, mage behind" concept calls for. If fighters can protect magi, then when fighters are around magi won't have to stay behind their protecting walls.
Another solution is to not have Coordination and Speed be tradeoffs with Focus and Self, then a mage can have a much melee defense as a fighter, and he or she will be happy to join the fighter in standing toe-to-toe and fighting monsters "the right way." A solution that perhaps would quiet whiners... but is being a meleer really the way a mage should work?
Turbine Designers have made a de facto policy that "everyone must melee." They have done this by making changes which shorten the range of Drain and Harm spells, by reducing the XP that can be gained by "wall working" (putting a timer on how long one can work at killing a monster that cannot kill the character), by reducing the availability of archery perches (making lamps and rocks ethereal), by increasing the casting range and casting heights that missile throwing monsters have, and by giving only the smallest trickle of XP for non-killing activities such as cooking and fletching.
These changes have been particularly hard on non-meleeing magi, which has made them a difficult and unrewarding character class to play. The short term result has been to successfully marginalize mage characters -- those magi who do not have good melee defense and can not throw high level protection spells have been herded into "life mage ghettos" such as Dungeon of Corpses. (Dungeon of Corpses is the one new dungeon that is filled with high level monsters that can be "wall worked.")
But a high level "buff mage" is still a valuable character to have around for helping warriors perform well beyond their basic level abilities. So, even though they are not much fun to play, high level non-meleeing magi are of great value. Ingenious players have devised a high tech solution to this conundrum They have devised ways to build high level magi without actually playing the character -- the process is called "macroing." Macroing basically consists of setting in motion a monotonously repetitive script that will have a character mindlessly perform a series of actions that produce a steady trickle of XP with no human intervention. After running the macro for many, many hours, the character will have built up a respectable amount of XP, and he or she can be taken over by a human operator... to be used as a buff mage "mule" to a melee "main."
The rise of macro magi is a direct indicator that Turbine Designers have succeeded in sucking the entertainment value out of mage playing, but not the usefulness. In attempting to appease the melee-is-the-only-right-way whiners who complained that mages had it too easy, they have laid solid foundations for the rise of macro mages.
The Turbine Designers of playability have a bad habit: they pander to "whiners", rather than watching what people who are quietly enjoying the system are doing.
Here some specifics: the bad results of listening to whiners. These are "fixes" implemented during Beta: (fixes which ended up being like getting my dog fixed) All of these fixes reduced playability a lot.
The abuse:
In the early beta, player and monster corpses were treated equally: both could be opened soon after death by other players. Some players whined loudly that they were loosing their greatest treasures to "scum-of-Dereth looters." Turbine Designers responded by closing player corpses until the owner of the corpse had inspected it.
The richness lost:
Before this change if I was traveling in the deep wilderness with fellows and I died, my fellows would loot my body and I would get my stuff back from them when they later returned to town. This happened to me many times in beta. Sometimes I was traveling the wilderness with close friends, sometimes with complete strangers. As long as someone survived, I got my stuff back. Sure, some people defected and kept my stuff, but that didn't happen often, so I felt I would lose little if I died in the wilderness... as a result I wandered far and wide.
The way it stands now -- where I have to return to my body personally to open it -- I lose a lot if I'm traveling in the wilderness -- solo or in a group. If I've traveled far from a lifestone before I die, I have to travel far to recover my death items, and the most a fellowship or partner can do to help is report the coordinates of where I died.
We vote for opening corpses again. If that can't be done is a 2nd best alternative:
Update: As of the June 01 patch. The @permit command was added to allow others to open a character's corpse, and the coordinates of a corpse are issued at time of death. This are fine additions, and they address the wilderness travel issue quite nicely.
The abuse:
It seems that whiners got "their knickers in a twist" because low level characters where parading around with artifact-class weapons and armor.
"It's an abuse. It's disbalancing." was the cry.
In response Turbine Designers prescribed who could go where in Dereth by level restricting dungeons and portals, and making portals untieable -- and these prescriptions are pervasive. The most obnoxious example of this prescriptive thinking is the series of portals on the Sword of Lost Light Quest. It takes five portals to get from Stonehold to the Hall of Lost Light and those five portals are level restricted to 17, 19, 21, 23, and 25th levels respectively. Talk about serious frustration for a newbie who starts trying to make that quest as a 15th level!
The richness lost:
What these whiners failed to think about was: that low-level player didn't penetrate the artifact's defenses on his or her own, he or she went as part of a team... and most likely that team had an exciting and heroic time getting that low level character to the artifact. This is one of the classic forms of adventure: the rookie - veteran form where the veteran shows the rookie the ropes... and it can make a very exciting tale!
Think of Treasure Island, the original Star Wars, The Three Musketeers... all these are rookie-veteran stories. See my Doc Feelgood Campfire Tale: Seeking the Sword of Lost Light.
But.. that heroic form will thrive no more.. not on Dereth. It was an abuse. <sigh> Now in the name of stopping abuse we have level discrimination on Dereth. Only high levels can go in high level dungeons, and only low levels can go in low level dungeons. Dereth is a duller place.
The abuse:
Perhaps Lugian Hill was originally designed to be a "terror point", I don't know. What I know is that by mid-beta it had become a world-renown opportunity point. Lugians spawned there in huge numbers, and Lugians produced good treasure and huge XP to those who could master them. Players learned this, and learned that when a mob of players were in the area, the Lugians could be mastered, so the Hill became a permanent mob scene. There was great risk -- Lugian Hill was always littered with corpses of players and monsters alike -- but great reward as well; there was always a stream of players trudging slowly back towards town, burdened down by huge loads of treasure and XP.
Apparently all these corpses and overburdened adventurers were an abuse, so Lugian Hill had to be fixed.
The richness lost:
Lugian Hill supported a rich ecosystem of player types and activities, it was a "Peruvian fishing ground" of Dereth. Lugian weapons require a lot of strength to haul out. When the weapons were plentiful and valuable, the strong toe-to-toe fighters would come to the Hill, fight a while, and then haul out weapons. The nearby unclimbable cliff allowed archers and war magi to participate in the ecosystem profitably, too. And the ecosystem supported "looters" -- those who specialized in treasure hauling rather than fighting. It was a fun, exciting place.
The first "Lugian Hill fix", the one in mid-beta, reduced the number of Lugian weapons in the treasure, reduced the value of the weapons, and changed the geography to eliminate the nearby unclimbable cliff. These changes did not dry up the Lugian Hill opportunity completely, but they did change who could benefit most from Lugian Hill. The Lugians were still plentiful at Lugian Hill so there was lots of XP to be earned, but the toe-to-toe fighters, archers and war magi could not benefit as much, and many left.
Ironically, the Life Magi -- who played a minor part in the pre-fixed Lugian Hill ecosystem -- flourished in the post-fix environment. Life Magi could "hide in the cracks" where Lugians couldn't get to them easily. In pre-fix Lugian Hill, Life Magi killed too slowly to prosper, but with the swift-killing toe-to-toe warriors, archers and war magi out of the way, Life Magi could take their turn at "abusing the system", and mobs of Life Magi became a common sight at Lugian Hill.
Unfortunately, Turbine Designers saw their prosperity as just that -- an abuse -- so at the start of Sudden Season they "fixed" Life Magi by reducing the range on Harm spells.
And the designers finally "fixed" Lugian Hill for good by reducing the spawn rate on Lugians and adding Mountain Rats. The Hill as a rich ecosystem is now a fading memory.
To recap, the richness lost was the wonderful ecosystem of players interacting to harvest this rich XP and treasure source. Many specialties and play styles were supported at Lugian Hill, there were many "right ways" to exploit the resource, and this variety of right ways is the kind of thing that makes Asheron's Call interesting.
The Lugian Hill ecosystem was never broken, the playability of the various player types was never broken, Lugian Hill was merely being adapted to. If the designers wanted to "break" Lugian Hill and make it as attractive as the rest of Dereth (just average), they should have simply moved it further from town, or started with slowing down the Lugian spawn rate. They should not have broken it by nerfing characters.
Turbine's Designers made "the Lugian Hill mistake" again in June 00 when they first opened Black Spawn Den to Dereth. In this case the "terror" was fast genning 128th level Tusker Slaves in a dungeon "too big to be wall worked." The designers were correct in their presumption about wall working. Tuskers are fast and the halls and rooms of Black Spawn Den were huge. The corners were rounded so it was easy for the tuskers to close with anyone, anywhere in the dungeon. By all rights, this dungeon should have been a terror.
It was a terror for melee fighters, but the life magi and archers discovered they could "gang work" instead of "wall work." The Life magi discovered that if enough Life magi stayed in a bunch together -- a dozen or so -- they could drop the Tuskers with life magic before too many of the magi died. Once again, an ecosystem sprang up, and once again Turbine Designers saw "abuse" and ended it in July, a month later, by turning down the spawn rate.
(Compare the fate of Black Spawn Den to it's sister dungeon, Lugian Citadel. Lugian Citadel is another of the "new style" terror dungeons, with big, simple architecture, fast spawn rates and curved corners. The Lugian Citadel attracted melee fighters instead of life magi and it has not been "nerfed." "Why not?" wonders my Life mage, "Especially since it's the only dungeon that suffers portal storms.")
There are two lessons to be learned from this Lugian Hill/Black Spawn Den experience:
Update Sep 2001: the rise of "cruise ship social director" ecosystems. In the summer of 2001 Turbine Designers answer to the ecosystem problem was to build a series of dungeons that forced cooperation. The lowest level of these is the Emperyon Cloisters dungeon east of Yaraq where one obtains the Obsidian Dagger. To gain the dagger, and other quest items, the party must split into two groups that must pull levers for each other to open doors. Yes... this is a "sort of an ecosystem" because the players must cooperate. But no it's not really an ecosystem because the cooperation is so limited and static. It's a "social Director's" ecosystem (OK, everyone! We're going to play a game, and here's what you do...). Turbine Designers still aren't supporting the ecosystem concept.
Ten or fifteen years ago a cute little game called Lemmings was popular for a while. It was a fun little game in which the user would work at rescuing the Lemmings by helping them dig or build a way through obstacles. Cute, but the designer made a big playability flaw: he made the difficult levels more difficult by reducing the kinds of Lemmings available. He "took tools out of the toolbox", and as a result the higher levels were quite dull to play compared to the lower levels.
Don't make the same mistake in Asheron's Call: Don't pull tools away from your players. If Life Magi are learning to master life spells and become effective with them, don't penalize them by reducing the potency of Life spells. If your players are getting high enough level they can start wandering the Direlands, don't toughen up the Direlands to keep them out.
The abuse:
Characters would jump on light stands and other man-made objects and shoot monsters from these points. At Olthoi points they would jump on the rock ledge. In those places characters were high enough that the monsters could not strike back. Characters would stand inside buildings and shoot at monsters that could not get through the doorways. Archers and war magi would shoot at Lugians from the tops of the stone towers.
Until stronger story lines are revealed to the players in Dereth, geography -- the map -- is AC's main way of offering variety. So, it is a shame when the designers pull back on their fine achievements in handling geometry in the name of "stopping abuse".
For example: there is an abandoned hilltop city east of Zaikhal. We call it Crude Monogua Hill because the city is overrun with Crude Monoguas. It's an excellent place to practice urban combat skills. The Crude Monoguas that have overrun the city are big, fast, dangerous monsters -- no single sub-teens character in wilderness terrain can stand up to a pack of Crude Monoguas, even a pack of such heroes has a tough time. But in that "urban environment" -- a place with buildings and tents -- the monoguas did have exploitable weaknesses. They could not get through doorways easily, and they had a tendency to fall off cliff edges when they were in hot pursuit.
The result: there were a handful of sanctuaries around the city where players could run and monoguas could not pursue. Once a player discovered this, it became a fun place to dart in and out of buildings and take potshots at monoguas. The maneuvering wasn't easy or straightforward, but one could develop the skills of leading the monsters to places where they could be shot at, but could not return fire. All in all, a most rewarding kind of play. The player who learned was rewarded with lots of XP and modest amounts of treasure.
But no more <sigh>. Using terrain to the player's advantage is an abuse, and to correct it the Crude Monoguas were made a bit smaller so they could fit through doors and tent openings, and a bit thinner so they could run behind the buildings next to the cliffs and not fall off, the same as players can.
In the same spirit, Lugians were allowed to toss boulders higher so they could pop characters at the tops of towers.
The loss of richness:
Why do this? This is the equivalent to making geography irrelevant. These changes are the equivalent of saying it makes no difference where a person stands and fights. These changes are the equivalent of saying only strong, heavily armored players can prosper -- players for whom terrain has little importance. Those who try to prosper by being quick and exploiting terrain are penalized.
This is so odd! Especially when... without lots and lots of good story lines to sample... geography is AC's strongest playing feature! It's a mystery to me.
The solution is not to "nerf" Crude Monogua Hill, but to make more of them! Terrain is interesting to work with, so make more interesting terrain, not less.
September 2001 update: Turbine Designers still have not learned this lesson. The "new school" dungeons are simple in layout and gain all their interest from their fast monster spawn. Gone are winding corridors and big rooms with multiple levels, bridges and niches. The new school dungeons are deliberately perchless and wallworkless, and best suited for "tank" meleers.
July 2002 update: Turbine Designers still haven't learned. In May 02 they changed the monster pursuit algorithm so that if a monster gets stuck for a few seconds trying to return to it's spawn point, it will teleport back to it's spawn point and return to full strength. They justify this change as "fighting abuse" by eliminating the "pitting tactic". The problem is that pitting is a pleasant alternative to toe-to-toe fighting, and stuck monsters are lots of fun to tease. Just two days before the change, we succeeded in luring Gigas Lugians and Drudge Raveners into the mansion, and down three flights of stairs, into the mansion's cells. It was a kick to see something in those cells! It was the most fun we'd had that month! Once again, Turbine Designers are saying that going toe-to-toe is the only proper way to fight a monster, and doing anything else with a monster is an abuse.
Turbine Designers can't see the distinction between "working the system" they have designed and "abusing the system" they have designed -- a first level DM's mentality. From the player's perspective the playability changes have discriminated against players who have taken time to research the world that Dereth is and learned to exploit it efficiently.
These "anti-abuse" changes are producing a vanilla world where only "designer-approved" roads to success will be supported, or even allowed. This is a shame, success in discovering ways to exploit the environment should be rewarded with XP and treasure, not penalized by, "What? You can't succeed that way, it's an abuse!"-kinds of rule changes.
Likewise, level discrimination makes Dereth vanilla. If a veteran can't show a rookie "the ropes", the game is less interesting.
Designing playability to end abuse has many problems. The first of these is that it makes it hard for beginners. Experienced players have already taken great advantage of an "abuse" by the time designers decide to fix it. But once it is fixed, newcomers can't use the technique to advance their characters. The net effect is to make Dereth a harder and less rewarding place to exist. It also makes working through the low levels a drudgery task rather than an interesting task.
This is discouraging new blood from coming into the game, and it's making starting a new character for "old blood" less interesting. If I want to try out a new character with different mix of abilities, I have to plan to take that character to 20th level now before it can begin to function comfortably in Dereth. Even with all the techniques for "power leveling" we know, that's a lot of hours of preparation. July 02 update: because of inflation, it's now quick and easy to get to 20th level, but to really "feel" how a character will work out, it must be taken to 40 or 50th level now.
Turbine Designers don't need to be so patronizing. Players will make things hard enough for themselves, by themselves. In a complex world such as Dereth should be, each person will have the opportunity to gravitate to the difficulty they aspire to. The more the designers try to make Dereth a place where "one difficulty fits all", the more plain, vanilla and boring Dereth becomes.
As of this writing there are two Level 100 characters in Dereth.
This is bad news.
It means Turbine Designers don't know how to end their game.
There are two problems with a "never-ending game" (a game that allows characters to go to level 100, and beyond, is a good definition of a never-ending game.)
Turbine Designers have decided to follow their lead players in their monthly redesigns. This means that Dereth is steadily getting to be a harder place to live in. This is frustrating because this is a way of taking tools out of the tool box.
In April and May of 2000 our characters were getting into their high twenties. They were capable of traveling some of the Direlands, and just on the verge of attempting some "trans Direlands runs" to explore the lands between Fort Tethiana and Disaster Maze. With the June update, which introduced sticky monsters, Bone Skeletons and other high level monsters, our characters where driven from the Direlands wildernesses, and they never returned.
Level inflation has come to Dereth. What twentieth levels could previously accomplish now takes thirtieth or fortieth levels. The latest incarnation of Level Inflation is the high skill levels required to dye armor. What kinds of characters are going to have Cooking and Alchemy skills in the 250 range? Only characters who have been diligent fighters for months, and are now in the 30's to 40's level range, and add "artisanry" to their skill mix -- not characters that started life with strong "artisan" skills (skills that are based on Coordination and Focus -- alchemy, cooking, fletching, lockpicking and healing) and mediocre fighting skills. The way things are now, what's an artisan character to do for 30 levels? We feel the current artisan motto is, "I have to kill to cook." Why should this be?
Level inflation was the straw that broke us. Playing the "level inflation game" wasn't interesting, so we switched to playing in Darktide instead to see if player versus player could sustain our interest in AC.
What Turbine should have done instead of level inflation was cap characters at level 50. A character that reached level 50 had "won the game" and would be put in the "Hall of Fame". The character would have it's stats on display and things such as @age for its levels and quests completed. The character could keep playing, but it couldn't advance in XP anymore. July 02 update: Turbine finally did cap at level 126 -- way, way too high -- but they never took any action to proclaim such a character "a winner."
Would the player of that character likely stop playing and stop giving Turbine their hard-earned $10 a month? Hardly, the player of the character would likely keep playing by trying to advance another character into the Hall of Fame, even faster, or with a different class. Turbine had little to loose by capping characters, and much to gain. What would they gain?
One of our group is a trader at heart, and he constantly bemoans the lack of formal opportunities for trade in the game (lack of caravans, lack of places to store goods off-character, lack of tradable price differentials between towns.), and he constantly researches for oversights that allow profitable trade.
In beta he discovered the Dryreach Beer Run (see the Doc Feelgood campfire tale) -- an exploitable price differential in mead between Dryreach and Rithwic. In the commercial release we ran that run when we needed cash, and never saw another soul doing it. In March our trader discovered a substantial improvement on the oversight involving Peerless Lockpicks -- which the Dryreach Bartender would also buy at a substantial markup.
We ran this Peerless Lockpick Oversight the rest of March and through April. During that time we saw only one other player making the same run, and he reported that he made this run on a couple other worlds, and only one or two other people worked the run on any world he worked.
Then one night, just 48 hours ahead of the May 00 update, 24 characters showed up in Leafcull Dryreach making the Peerless lock pick run! We talked with a couple of the new crowd and found they had read a message about the oversight on a monarchy bulletin board.
The May update came and the Dryreach run was shut down -- the barkeep would not buy lock picks and the price of beer in Dryreach was dropped to standard.
From our point of view, the timing couldn't have been better. We had each pulled over a million pyreals out of the run, and now no one would ever fill packs with "D" notes from Dryreach again. But, there was a nagging problem.... The problem was the sudden influx of characters just 48 hours before the oversight was plugged? Why such a sudden influx at just that last moment?
The answer was: someone in Turbine Design had leaked both the oversight and the fact that Turbine Designers were going to fix it. They had leaked the information to some of their cronies, and one of them had published a message on a monarchy board.
This wasn't the only piece of information ever leaked from Turbine Design; it was just the piece we had our first contact with.
Why is an information leak important? It's important because Turbine Design justifies "ending abuse" -- nerfing character classes in particular -- on the grounds that "characters are competing, and what happens to one character is important to what happens to another." The last I checked, cronyism wasn't a tool for leveling a playing field. (This characters-are-competing choice was not an inevitable one on Turbine's part. They could just as easily have taken the position that "characters are not competing, and what happens to one character doesn't matter to another character, as long as the players of both are enjoying the game.") But, having made the choice that characters are competing, and if they insist on justifying their nerfing of my magi and archers as "leveling the playing field" with melee-types, then they better be explaining pretty clearly how they are not being hypocrites when they are leaking information to their cronies.
The aspect of the game most sensitive to cronyism is the storyline quests. If a few people are getting quest information days ahead of its formal release, and in a lot more detail than what is in the formal release, then that's hardly a level playing field for those pursuing the quests.
March 2001 update: Quests are not the only way cronies benefit. Many times when Turbine creates a specialty item, it will be very powerful at first, then nerfed -- one example is GSA armor, another is ending Gertarth's Dagger. A more current example is the handling of Aerfell's Keep on Alterinth Isle. Here's a quote from March Developer's Notes about changes in the March 01 "Spring's Sorrows" Patch
"Updated Aerfalle's Keep with the new anti-macro design. All creatures in the dungeon, except for the Hellfires and Lag Beasts, are now on event generators. The death of the Watchman will activate the spawn. The death of Aerfalle *OR* the passage of ninety minutes will turn off all generators and empty the dungeon again. You can't macro drain what isn't there. There are now powerful Mana Drain hotspots in Aerfalle's Keep exit portal room. Do not enter this area unless you intend to leave. The cells in lower Aerfalle's Keep have been changed. Increased the spawn rate of the Umbris from ten to twelve minutes. The big, peaceful Panumbris next door has been removed. Its room is now filled with Mana Drain hotspots. Removed many Mana Blight and Dispel traps in the final hallway of Aerfalle's Keep. Aerfalle's Key is now a no-drop item. Lady Aerfalle cracked open some of her dusty old grimoires and learned new spells. Expect painful but brief (one to five minute) debuffs."
Sounds all well and good... until you think about the fact that Aerfalle's Keep has been in existence for, what?, four or six months? This means cronies have been quietly reaping the advantages of stratospheric-level playability and macroing "holes" for that long. Now, just as the circle of players who can reach Aerfalle's Keep is widening, the holes will be fixed, so that "the rest of us" can't level up using the same tools as the leaders.
When cronies know what items are coming and what items will be nerfed, is this is disbalancing to non-cronies? What is "level" about this playing field?
A final example of cronyism: counting on cronies to distribute the information on how to accomplish quests. Our group recently completed the Focus Stone quest at the Mines of Despair. To accomplish this we had to take two skulls, each from a different dungeon, and give them to a hermit on the hill above the Mines of Despair. He would then give us keys that would open doors in the dungeon. Consider that the monsters loosing their skulls didn't tell us what to do with the skulls, and that all the hermit says when you talk to him is, "Get out of here! And close the door behind you!" How is a hero supposed to figure out from information within the game how to get a Focus Stone? (We found out how to do it by reading up on the quest on web sites posted by cronies.) July 02 update: many of the new quest items detail who is interested in the item, and NPC's will give back items that are not of interest to them -- both of these are good changes.
In the Summer of 01, Turbine Designers decided, pretty much Out Of The Blue, that metal armor and pyreals were too heavy. Pyreals became weightless and metal armor was halved in weight and improved in it's protectiveness. These are *huge* changes to the playing parameters, but Turbine Designers seemed oblivious to this.
Their obliviousness became painfully obvious when two months later they had to completely revamp the merchant pricing structure to end "schlepping abuse"--moving goods from one merchant to another for huge profits. (they had opened a new, much bigger version, of the "Dryreach Charity Run"-hole.) They chose to change all the merchants' pricing rather than admit they had made a mistake when changing armor and pyreal parameters.
This episode is a symptom that Turbine Designers are now slaves of their own marketing hype. They *have* to change the game, even if the changes make it worse.
The "evolving story line" adds little richness to the game from a player's perspective. It is for the most part, irrelevant. This is for several reasons:
The result is quests that are very difficult to accomplish, and produce little reward... they are irrelevant.
There are other, more enduring ways to add quest richness to the game. Here are a few.
The following are problems that have been around long enough. New bells and whistles are nice; new story lines are nice; but here are some old things that should get fixed first... like... Right now!
One of us works The Pit dungeon near Stonehold a lot, and that one of us is really tired of getting hit by Mountain Rats who are eight feet away and behind a solid stone wall. Being able to fight with monsters through a door is stupid and should end, but taking 103 points of breath damage from a Mountain Rat on the far side of a stone wall (or a level below me when I'm standing on a hollow rock) is ridiculous! Fix it so that a solid wall is a solid wall, and a solid door is a solid door! Fix it!
If a character attempts to look at a corpse and can't get it open, it will run back to that corpse and try to open it the next time combat is started. It will do so until the character has successfully opened a corpse. This has only been going on since beta, please fix this.
In January the Wintersebb server was opened. (How pervasive is the cronyism? Well, two weeks before Wintersebb opened, Turbine was apologizing profusely in public for missing an opening date they had never publicly announced.) After opening, Wintersebb went through an interesting population gyration. For the first three weeks of it's existence, it was the most popular AC server. Then, a group of heroes made it to Alerinthe Isle and defeated the Dark Lady -- the then-current final quest. Within three days Wintersebb went from top of the charts to bottom, where it now sits. What had happened?
Clearly there was a race among many veterans of other servers to complete the Dark Lady Quest. Once there was a winner, all the racing veterans went back to their old servers. The veterans came, saw, conquered, and went home -- all in three weeks. The new server gave the cronies three additional weeks of entertainment, and then they were done with it. Is this a good sign? I think not. It indicates that the game is both mature and not attracting many new players. The Wintersebb Phenomenon is a sign that AC is over the hill.
Technologically, Asheron's Call is a breakthrough game, and it's given us many hours of pleasing entertainment.
But the playability has never lived up to it's potential, and the playability has for a long time been drifting towards a "one right way to play" environment dominated by Doom/Quake-style heavily armored melee fighters.
We see this evolution as a shame -- the game has such potential to support ecosystems and many play styles. We hope this letter will help Turbine Design see the errors in their playability ways, and get at moving the game towards a system that is rich in ecosystems, and rich in numerous ways to play and enjoy the game.
Sincerely yours,
Roger "Doc Feelgood" White
Martin "Sunshine" Prier
Phill "Lost Leader" Baum
back to Doc Feelgood's Cast and Bash Clinic ..... Reader's Comments .... back to Doc Feelgood's on WE
A game has rules. But one of the rules of AC is that Turbine can change those rules at any patch. They are capricious gods. At a stroke they have:
Each of these changes is huge. Each changes the optimal mix of a character's design; some have been catastrophic. Gentleman was an appraisal mule I designed a year ago. He was designed to fulfill a specific need in the game: being able to shop and buy good weapons, armor, wands and jewelry for the monarchy. Gentleman was no retired mage; he was designed from the ground up for shopping. Then... poof!... in May 02 every character can ID everything. He's not needed; he no longer gets XP when he does his shopping, and the months I've spent developing this character (he's 26th level now) are now wasted. To repeat: I spent months building this character because in the old system he was valuable. Now that time I spent on him is no longer valuable. The valuable time I spent on him is now wasted time, and I wonder: "Why did I spend all that time on him?" which makes me further wonder, "Why have I spent all this time on AC?" This is not what you want me feeling, Turbine.
Likewise, with the nerfing of Drain Magic in July 02, one of the principle tools of my mages -- one I designed for -- has been ripped away. I've spent months and months on these mages. They are the products of careful research and experimentation. Now... poof!... they are no longer right for the world they live in. This isn't fun, Turbine!
It's an ironic twist that while the playing rules for characters are highly mutable, the dungeons those characters play in are unchanging. Dungeons should change monthly not playing rules. Turbine could easily meet their marketing requirement for monthly change by updating the monster spawn and chest spawn in dungeons... particularly those that are "failures" in the sense that no one is visiting them. A place to start the update process would be with Direlands dungeons. It has always seemed strange that Direlands dungeons are places of refuge from the wilderness, not vice versa.
There are now many, many dungeons in Dereth, and very few have changed since their creation. If the monster spawn in them was updated, it would be a source of monthly entertainment to see what had changed, and what had become worthwhile pursuing in the dungeons. (In them, and around them -- many dungeons that would otherwise be popular to visit are spoiled by the nature of the spawn around the entrance and exits -- Swamp Temple East being an example)
While we are on the subject of dungeon change: it would be pleasing to provide alternate paths to the BDT of the dungeon. Rarely should there be only one way into a location. There should usually be at least two, and the two routes should present different mixes of obstacles. There can be a "fighting all the way" path that is long and filled with hard-fighting spawn. In addition there can be locked door paths that are opened with lockpick skill or a special key that can short-circuit much of the spawn, or a "Lara Croft" path where jumping skill can short-circuit much of the spawn -- jumping up, or over pits. Perhaps some doors that open when magic spells are cast on them. Secret doors and corridors can be part of the mix, but if they are, the location of the secret door should "spawn" at different locations, so there is at least some "secret" about them. Likewise, if there are traps, they should move about... and there should be trap-detecting skill and trap disarming skill.
The inflation continues unabated.
These are examples of inflation. These events could not have happened a year ago -- a year ago these monsters would have been formidable opponents for 40th levels. And two years ago monsters of this high level were found only in a handful of remote locations, or did not exist. Now, thanks to better armor, weapons, and buff bots, these previously dangerous monsters are fodder for 2nd to 20th levels. And, as a result, these 2-20th levels will only be 20th levels for a few hours. They are quickly on their way to being 30th and 40th levels. These days I can take a newly-minted character, without resource, on a strange server, to 8th level, in just four hours.
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| 16th level Olf (now 17th) standing over his 2nd Panumbris Shadow kill (121st level monster). He was assisted by Father's Slave, a 55th level buff mage. |
What has happened to the beginning game? There isn't any beginning game anymore! Inflation has swallowed it whole. To give you newcomers an idea of just how much inflation there has been, read Doc's Campfire Tale of journeying to the Hall of Lost Light (HOLL), and note the level of the characters involved. (read any of the Campfire Tales, for that matter)
Game inflation is done by game designers for the same reason money inflation is done by national governments: it's a way for the designers/government to give players/citizens what appears to be something for nothing. In the long term inflation cheapens the world, and destroys the credibility of the designers and governments in both environments.
I admit it: were I asked, I would have been first in line to ask for longer spell durations -- buffing is so tedious.
But seeing what a huge change the long durations have brought to the game, I see now that extending spell durations was a bad idea. When Turbine designers made this change, they worried that the simplified magic system, including long spell durations, would create a world dominated by mage characters. (This worry about "mage imbalance" then became Turbine Designers' excuse to nerf Drain spells, which followed the next month... and that was the final change for me. I loved my mages, and they loved Draining.)
Turbine Designers were blindsided by the reality that the simplified magic system had a modest effect on the game, but the long durations had a huge effect, and that the prime beneficiary of long spell durations would be the non-mages. Thanks to the combination of long duration spells and macros, it is now practical to have "buff 'bots" -- mage characters who spend their existence on Dereth doing nothing but buffing others with Level 6 or Level 7 buffs -- and that those buff bots would change the playing field dramatically.
The world of Dereth is now divided into "have" and "have not" characters. Those who have access to "buff bots" never fight or quest without level 6 or 7 buffs, and fly through quests and leveling at record-breaking rates. (For instance, getting to 40th level in a week of real-time play. Those who don't have access to such buffs struggle through in the old fashioned way and take months to reach 40th.)
A dungeon such as Emperyon Cloisters has been nerfed by the long spell durations. The dungeon is level limited to 15-30th levels. Historically, a high level mage could buff up a character before entering that dungeon, and that "Patron Buff" would last only through the first half of the dungeon. The second half would have to be accomplished with only what buffs the 15ths through 30ths could bring with them -- either from magic jewelry they carried or from the mages who traveled with groups. The result: a dungeon where the first half could be tough or very easy, but the second half was always very tough. Nowadays, "have" questers can buff at a mansion, run to the dungeon, and complete the entire dungeon before their buffs wear off -- the second half is as easy as the first half, and the dungeon can be "soloed" by two just two characters.
Emperyon Cloisters is just not the same place; no dungeon is. Nexus, Lugian Citadel and Hall of Metos are other dungeons that are heavily impacted by "have" characters who come in and clean out the monsters "chop, chop" then depart to buff again.
Long Buffs change character optimization. Those with buffs don't have to worry about acquiring or operating magic items (such as a Coordination Ring, or even a Simulacra Shield or Helm) so Focus is a meaningless attribute, and Arcane Lore a meaningless skill. (This combines with the tossing away of appraising skill to make Focus totally meaningless to a melee or archer) In this new environment the first spells a "have" character can benefit from learning personally are the third level Recall Spells, so Focus 10, Self 10 designs are optimal. Likewise, this character will benefit most if most XP is plowed back into weapon skill, not spread around to various skills and attributes. Plowing back XP into weapon skill lets the character take on monsters five to fifteen times his or her level, so the XP flow is a huge flood.
Extended spell durations promote extreme-of-extreme character designs. And, once again, it is the new players and low level characters who will feel these changes the most. Once again: the low level game, beginning game and balanced character design are being sacrificed to a pandering inflation policy.
Recommendation: Long spell durations are nice, so if they must be compensated for, nerf Protect spells, not Drain spells. If Protect spells don't protect so heavily, then other defenses -- melee defense, missile defense and magic resistance -- become more important. Buff 'bots loose some of their benefit, and XP can be productively spread to defensive skills instead of just weapon skills. This promotes balanced character designs. Without hefty Protect spells, low level characters can't be chasing around high level monsters with impunity, so the low level/beginning game becomes more balanced, too.
I have looked back at what I wrote in Doc Feelgood's Cast and Bash Clinic about good character design. One of my basic conclusions was that extreme characters designs were not productive in AC, and that was a sign of good design.
I still think that designing a world where "moderate" characters thrive is a sign of good design. I also think that Turbine has lost this. I no longer recommend "moderate" characters -- extreme is the way to go: for instance, all meleers but daggers should have 100 Str, 10 End, 100 Coord, 100 Quick, 10 Focus, 10 Self, and be specialized in their weapon and Melee Defense (beyond that, the player is free to choose), and, as XP is gained, most or all of it should be plowed back into weapon skill.
What has happened to Dereth to change the recommendation from moderate to extreme? Several things:
An example of favoring extreme design: In my last generation of character building, I built two mages, Fermi and Zelta, and took both to 50th level. (This meant both had just entered "high level" by Turbine Designers definition.) Fermi was a "balanced" mage -- by 50th level he was trained in four magic schools and Melee Defense. Zelta was an "extreme" model -- she was specialized in Life Mage and War Magic at birth, and it took her getting to level 50 to get finally Item magic. Both did their final "sprint" from 45 to 50 in Obsidian Singularity Repository where they faced mostly Tusker Guards with Virindi Puppets. Who was stronger in this environment? Zelta was distinctly stronger. Fermi's "little bit of Melee Defense" didn't go a long way. Instead, it was high skill in Life magic to throw level 6 Protects and in Item magic to throw level 6 Banes that blunted the tusker attacks, not melee defense. And it was high skill in Life and War magic that let attacks succeed. Zelta was distinctly more powerful than Fermi in that environment. What Fermi spent in skill credits on Melee Defense, and in XP on Quickness, Coordination and Melee Defense did not benefit him as much as what Zelta gained by concentrating her spending on Focus, Self and the Magic Schools -- extreme design won out. In that Tusker/Virindi environment, Fermi's performance was about two levels behind Zelta's. (Deeper in the dungeon lived Virindi Masters and Tusker Rampagers. There Zelta's extreme design became even more beneficial because she could affect the Rampagers where Fermi's magic would just bounce off.)
When extreme characters thrive, it's a sign that the players of those characters have found the edges of the system, and they are exploiting them. Some drift towards extreme characters is to be expected as players master the system and gain resources. But Turbine Designers have aided and abetted the drift enormously with every change designed to "end abuse" or "make the game easier" -- they have not kept balance and tradeoff in mind, and have not had the vision or guts to enforce tradeoff even when they saw they were ending it. They have, instead, been quite... capricious, quite... gods-like. Maybe our characters should be praying to them???
The "New Turbine" has never understood the vision of the "Old Turbine" and they have never had the guts to stand up to whiners and say: "This is what the new vision is:..." Instead they pander, and inflate, and make huge arbitrary changes to the game playing environment that "make things easier", but upset months of planning and playing that are optimized to the existing environment. In the last three months that I played, Gentleman, Fermi and Zelta all suffered hugely under Turbine's capricious game rule changes -- three of my ten characters.... POOF! they are "basket cases." (Yes, I played two accounts, and, yes, I played many "mains").
And.. ten of my ten characters have been damaged by inflation. When I see a new character go from 2nd to 7th level in 7 minutes, and I think back on how long it took Doc Feelgood to get to 7th level...
I'll say it again to Turbine Designers: THIS KIND OF CHANGE IS NOT FUN.
Macros are computer programs that "play" a character -- having it do repetitive things that a computer can figure out how to do. Third party programs are programs that interact with Asheron's Call, but aren't owned by Turbine or Microsoft. Macros have a long history in computer games. They date back at least to Rogue being played on a DEC PDP-11 in the mid-1970's.
Certain aspects of Asheron's Call have always been ripe for macroing -- the mind-numbing "knitting" associated with cooking and alchemy skills being the most obvious -- and this was the first place macro's were used in AC. The development of better and better macros for AC has been fairly steady. A decisive improvement came in about mid-2001 when the packet code between the server and the client was dissected and Decal was introduced. Before Decal, macros has to guess when an action was complete, and lag didn't make this easy. After Decal the status of events could be determined directly from reading packets. After Decal appeared, macroing flowered, and 'bots began to appear.
The original "portal 'bots" caused an uproar that made me think of the song about John Henry and the Steel Driving Machine, and there were a lot of attempts to sabotage the early portal 'bots. Trade 'bots appeared in towns by merchants where players could find a small price advantage between buying raw materials and selling finished products. "Buff 'bots" and full-fledged "Combat 'bots" are the latest incarnations of macros. I have witnessed a combat 'bot backed up against a wall in Black Spawn Den and successfully taking on wave after wave of Tusker Guards.
Turbine, and Turbine's Whiners, have viewed macros as a threat to the system. Having gone way, way down the slippery slope of deciding that players are playing against each other.. having 'bots "win" by gaining XP faster than human-played characters was utter heresy, and to be squashed at all costs. Turbine's ongoing campaign to stop macros from winning has twisted the game, and made it a lot less fun for those of us who don't care about macros one way or the other. Steadily eliminating perches is a good example of this. If I'm an archer or mage, I like to perch, and it makes sense that I should! There are rocks on Marea Lassal, for instance, are taller than a player. Intuitively, these should be fine places to avoid getting bit by low-attacking Carenzie "puppy dogs". But no... these low-attacking, short, small, puppy dogs can reach up and attack people on top of these rocks, too. So... why are these rocks here? (Not the first time I've asked this question.) The July 02 attack on macros -- nerfing Drain spells -- struck at the heart of my mage tactics. Without Drain spells, my mages don't fight, and if my mages don't fight, why should I? (If I haven't made it clear earlier, nerfing Drains was the final step in driving me out of the game.)
Likewise, Turbine's slavish imitation of 3rd party features gets tiresome, too. After 6th Sense became popular, Turbine Designers decided that all monsters would show up on radar, not just moving ones. De facto, Turbine Designers act as if they are petty and jealous of their work.
Recommendation: ... it's too late. You've gone too far down the slippery slope. I have nothing to recommend.
Yes. It is true: Turbine has managed to smoothly implement a patch on time, and without a follow-up hot fix. They did that with the ..... well, anyway, I'm sure they have... once.
It makes no sense that if your going to update this program monthly... as in every month... you don't have adequate tools for testing what you are producing before you put it on-line. HELLO??... WHO's IN CHARGE HERE?
Nuff said.
Well, my toes still get bit by rats when I stand on top of a dungeon entrance rock, I still can fight through doors, and I still try to go back to a corpse and open it when I start combat after trying unsuccessfully to open a corpse.
But I'm sure something has been fixed.
Turbine: you still don't understand playability. You've got good start in your wonderful graphics, first person perspective, dodging spells, and load balancing servers, now learn how to "dungeon master" a game.
Roger "Doc Feelgood" White
(note: the others gave up on you months ago)
Turbine Designers are still "drunk-walking" Asheron's Call, but now that drunk walk has picked up a specific and ominous drift: the drift towards inflating the character capabilities.
Inflation is a "feel good" thing in the short term, but over the long-term it is a great destroyer -- a destroyer of communities, real world or gaming.
The feel good part of inflation is that for about a week everyone says, "Look what I can do now that I couldn't do before!"
The destroying part is that the playing environment looses it's balance. After that first week of thrill, you realize that the whole world has grown smaller, and cheaper, for your character.
I have cited examples earlier, but I will detail them again here.
The first round of inflation began when pyreals were made weightless. That opened the door for a whole series of changes. The drive behind these changes was a desire to make characters more "self-sufficient", which is another way of saying "eliminate tradeoffs" that force a character to cooperate with other specialty characters.
In early Asheron's Call a single character could not do everything. There was a need for specialty characters, and a need for cooperation between characters who had different special abilities. In the early days a strong meleer would "tank", a lockpicker would open chests after the monsters had been cleared, and a strong IDer (usually a mage) would pick out the good loot from the dross. But, this need for a mixed party was inconvenient for "those who advise the designers" (those whom I've previously called whiners), so this early environment that was compatible with tradeoffs and specialty characters has been dissolving with each rule change.
Another huge round of inflation was the lengthening of spell durations. This duration increase, combined with buff bots, has obsoleted every older quest dungeon in Dereth. It is now routine for a low level character to hunt in Dereth after receiving a full set of level 6 or level 7 buffs. And when so buffed, that low level can master monsters that previously only 40th levels could take on. I have seen a 2nd level archer go through Rumbies Hideaway dungeon on Vesayan Islands and waste dozens of 35th level Mosswart Fanatics without blinking. One circuit of the place and that second level was a 7th level. This is fun for an hour... but that's not what Rumbies was designed for, and the person running that character got no real thrill out of that experience... other than boasting for a while that he could get his 2nd to a 7th level in ten minutes.
In between these huge inflation rounds, there has been the steady increase in the effectiveness of armor and weapons. Higher AL armor is now available, and weapons are doing more damage. Another example: In the early days of Dereth an AL 120 Mattekar Hide Coat was a prize, and Dereth dungeons were designed for a world where AL 120 was the highest a monster would see on a character.
In old Dungeons and Dragons terminology, Dereth is now a "Monty Hall Dungeon" -- a place where the monsters are skinny and the loot is fat, and the challenge nonexistent.
The problem with a Monty Hall Dungeon is that it is no challenge -- there's nothing to write home about when you've completed it.
Another example of inflation damage shows up in jumping. In earlier Dereth -- when a mid-level character was a 15th or 20th level with level 3 or 4 protects -- a fall off a cliff was often deadly. In modern Dereth -- where mid-level is 40th and protects are 6's or 7's -- jumping off an inconveniently placed cliff is routine. Getting down is super easy, only getting up a cliff is hard.
Still another example is the de facto nerfing of quest equipment. Tikola's Daggers, Composite bows, Lilitha's bows, Atlan Weapons, Quest wands, Explorer Armor... the list of quest items that are no longer valuable is now about 80% of all quest items. Turbine Designers are obsoleting their own good work at a furious rate.
Inflation has materially changed the characters' relation to the environment. The world of Dereth was balanced for characters with a midrange of 20 and mid-level protects in the 3 to 4 range. Inflation has obsoleted the foundations of Dereth.
First off, Turbine Designers have to remember that RPG entertainment is about challenge. Yes, players will whine and moan when they are properly challenged, but they will keep coming back for more. A Monty Hall Dungeon is easy to walk away from, a challenging dungeon will keep a player engrossed and coming back for more. Personal experience: In the eighties I ran a D&D dungeon called Orthanc. Orthanc was a mean place: typically about 50% of the party died during an expedition, and in about one of every five expeditions... no one returned! In spite of that dismal survival rate, I kept getting flooded with requests to run Orthanc. The secret to Orthanc's success was it's consistency and the challenge. I had laid out the dungeon in advance, so I knew what monsters lurked where. This meant the players could trust the consistency of what they would face, and that I as Dungeon Master could deal quickly with unexpected actions by the players. I kept good records of who fought and died where, so the dungeon kept getting enriched with each expedition. Finally, I played my monsters aggressively, if they spotted player weaknesses or blunders, they went for the throat. But I did not introduce dues et machinas to save them -- when a party overcame an obstacle in a surprisingly easy way, they won! And I was as happy to see their success as they were.
So, the question is how to reintroduce balance, tradeoff and challenge back into this transformed world of modern Dereth. Here are some suggestions:
Slow the spawn rate. Make it more productive for characters to move on once they have cleared a patch of monsters. Make the spawn rate go even slower if the monsters in a location are dying frequently. Yes, there will be howls... because lots of people, including me, enjoy intense melee action. But if a player can consistently lay a circle of bodies around his or character, there is no challenge left at that spot -- all that is happening there is leveling.
In the same vein, "age" monsters. Make a fresh-spawned monster worth a quarter of the XP of a day-old monster.
Go through a systematic rework of the dungeons to update their spawn. Make the spawn appropriate for modern Dereth. The dungeons should be the difficult places in Dereth, not the havens from a much tougher surrounding wilderness.
Have wounded monsters run away rather than try to continue to close until death. Force a character to chase the monster to get in the "final blow". This will move the character to new terrain, and often bring fresh monsters into the battle.
Nerf protection spells. Let melee, magic and missile defense carry more of the players' defensive abilities. This will help restore some difference in fighting ability between low level and high level characters, and reduce the importance of buff bots.
Stop tweaking the world to make it hard on combat macros. You are making the world less diverse for all the rest of us. For instance, archers and mages should be perching! I miss taking advantage of the geography that was available in early Dereth. If the spawn rate is slow, and monsters run away when half wounded, permanent perching won't result in a "killing field".
In fact, stop worrying about combat macros all together! Don't let them obsess you. Think: Challenge the players!, not Anti-macro.
Stop designing the world so that extreme character designs are the most survivable. Bring back tradeoffs. Bring back an environment where there are "hard choices" to be made in character design and building. In a properly "moderate" world, and extreme design should not flourish when running solo, it should only work well when teamed with other characters who can cover deficiencies opened up by the "tradeoff" that was made when the extreme design was chosen.
Introduce shortages: Dereth is awash in a sea of money and basic supplies. Life is really easy. Lets have some adversity at the commodity level. Lets quarter the value of treasure. Lets have NPC merchants with limited, and variable, quantities of supplies. Let a player "merchant class" reemerge that can buy, sell and move goods to shortage areas profitably. Let pyreals weigh something again.
In sum: bring back tradeoffs. Let there be more than one right way to play Asheron's Call.
Doc Feelgood, Oct 2002
The good news for AC1 is that AC2 is a mess. AC2 is now revealed to be no competition for AC1. So, AC1 people, take advantage of your reprieve to put AC1 into a "lasting standard" category. You can do it! You can make AC1 as long-lived as Starcraft, but you will have to plan for that, and it means foregoing your current standard "cheap shot" policies -- the worst of those being: INFLATION!
Here is another example of inflation ruining a good system.
In Fall 2002 Turbine introduced the Tinkering system into AC1. In the spring of 2003 Doc finally had read enough and "tinkered around" enough to get a good grasp of what Turbine had wrought. Finally, with this added information, Doc could think, "This system isn't so bad..." (Note: that for this to happen, Turbine's "crony network" had to disseminate this information to a place where Doc could find it. The crony network is still alive and well, and Turbine is still relying on them to be a major conduit for providing in-depth information to players.)
Where inflation plays a role is in the workmanship of loot. Historically, loot workmanship averaged in the three to five range. But, as Turbine has been upping loot value with each patch, they have also been upping loot workmanship. The average is now in the six to eight range. Why does this matter? Because the number of times and item can be tinkered goes down as the workmanship goes up.
Here is an example: Doc, an armor tinkerer with 400 skill, can tinker a workmanship four item (W=4) five times before the chance of failure rises to over 5%. Doc can tinker a workmanship eight item (W=8) only two times before that happens.
What this means is: Turbine is once again obsoleting their own good work!
The tinkering system is a nice way to add variety to the treasure system. It could have been thought out a bit better, so that it didn't promote extreme-of-extreme solutions, but, on the whole it is nice. (An example of extreme-of-extreme is making it desirable that all the tinkering be of just one kind. For instance, with armor pieces, adding steel to improve the armor's armor rating is clearly the most effective tinker... every time the item is tinkered. The system doesn't promote "a little this and a little that"-style tinkering.)
In fall 2002, when Turbine introduced tinkering, a typical loot item could be tinkered five times. Thanks to Turbine's inflation policy, the typical loot item of Winter 2003 can be tinkered only two times. Tinkering is becoming less relevant. Once again, Turbine's Inflation policy is sucking the meat out of it's own system, and quickly.
This sucking the meat out of previous works has happened time and time again. Clearly Turbine must think there is no worth in their previous good labor because they are so happy to discard it. Old dungeons are made irrelevant to newly created characters because the monsters are wimpy, impoverished and have little XP to offer a character. Old landscape obstacles are rendered meaningless either by making them ethereal, or by the level 6 or 7 buffs new characters can routinely get.
Tusker Island (Nov 02 patch) offered players an express path to get characters into their seventies, and Valley of Death (Jan 03) takes them from seventies to nineties. These are examples of inflation geography. Why are Turbine Designers "short circuiting" the rest of Dereth? I don't know. <Sigh>
Number one: Turbine Designers... Kick the inflation habit! You are killing the longevity of the game!
You are no longer threatened by AC2, guys! I have worked with AC2. It will take two years and a new generation of client computers before AC2 shows off anything graphically superior to AC1, and it will take the same two years to get the code out of de facto beta. Now is the time to show some spine, and make this AC1 game a game that will last! (It can become a "Starcraft".)
Number two: Get serious about updating the older dungeons.
The update of Mount Lethe Dungeon was a faltering step in the right direction. But what an odd choice of a place to start? It was a "loser dungeon" even in beta days, and after the update, you left the BDT (Big Dungeon Treasure) unchanged -- the BDT is a level three Portal Recall spell? The same that you can buy in Hebian-to? Give me a break!
I suggest you work with the newbie dungeons, first, make them interesting again. Then work with Swamp Temple, East. There was a dungeon that always had great potential.
Number three: Instead of steady inflation, put some scarcity back into the game.
Let there be month-to-month variations in the availabilities of commodities. Let pyreals become a meaningful medium of exchange again.
You designers have been able to come up with some good, non-inflating systems. Do some more! An example of such a system is having imbuement be a risky proposition. This choice allows imbuement to "sink" large amounts of the most desirable loot. This something AC needs more of: ways to "sink" the top-end treasures that are sitting in player's chests. Another way to "sink" loot would be to have it "age". Let it loose capability with time, or, better yet, with use.
Likewise, if some commodity things become scarce for periods of time, this can liven up the economy.
Number Four: update quest items so they keep pace with inflation.
It is sorry, sorry indeed that the rewards for quests are the first casualties of this steady inflation policy. Players are very proud when they complete a quest, and the quest item they receive should reinforce that pride. It's a game disgrace that quest items are third or fourth fiddle in this game, and that good loot items are always of superior effectiveness to quest items.
That's all for now,
Doc, February 2003
Lots has changed with AC1... and little. AC now belongs wholly to Turbine, but there's no indication that Turbine Designers are going to kick either of their two worst habits: inflation and pandering to whiners.
My summary comment is: Show some spine, Turbine designers! Your job is to create an environment for players to play in, not play the game, and certainly not to tell players how to play the game. When you tell players how to play the game, your engaging in "Social Director" game design (OK Happy Campers... here's how we're doing to do this next part...). Your guiding philosophy should be: We designers are here to set an environment, then back off and let the players figure out how to play in it. Constantly listening to only to your players who chat on the boards isn't conducive to environment setting. Listen too much, and you end up with two problems: social director game design, and paying too much attention to those aspects of the game whiners are interested in. For example: PK and XP chains.
XP chains may have had some abuses, but they also had benefits. The Doc Feelgood clan consists of three accounts, and up until the nerfing they were arranged in a clan XP chain. I keep three accounts because I have friends who come over and play occasionally. I used the XP chain to keep characters in all three accounts roughly in line with each other on their XP Now, I can't do this.
The XP chain nerfing combined with the price increase means that I will mothball the third account. (Having two accounts is still handy for muling and buffing), so even with this price increase, Turbine will get no more money from me.
The other kind of account that is going to suffer from this price increase is the "spare" accounts used for trade 'bots and buff 'bots. These spare accounts are now going to be 50% more expensive. It's likely we are going to see a considerable contraction in bots, and I know this will reduce my enjoyment of the game.
If your goal with the price increase, Turbine, is to get more money from your players, you may want to think about this some more. If many of your players are maintaining multiple accounts, you are likely to see more mothballed accounts, not more money. Remember: storage bits are dirt cheap. Happy customers are something you have to work for.
Turbine designers have demonstrated time and again that they are ready, willing and able to tinker with the profoundest of "rule changes". In fact, they seem to prefer tinkering with the rules of the game over designing dungeons and quests. That being the case, here is where Turbine should be doing some game design tinkering...
#1. Nerf buffing. The advantages to buffing are enormous, and with the increased duration of spells enacted a couple years ago, and the widespread availability of "buff bots", the player who adventures without them is either foolish, or playing a different game, not conventional AC 1. There are three problems with this:
And finally, fully buffed low level characters find the level caps on dungeons extremely patronizing.
How to fix this? Nerf buffing, and bring back the utility of magic jewelry, magic clothes and magic armor: Let there be level seven spells on these items, and let there be a salvage material that lowers the Arcane Lore on items. (if the ALore of items can't be lowered, then buffing is still valuable -- low levels and those with low ALore will still be using buff bots.) The currently proposed solution -- shortening the casting time for high level self spells -- does very little to solve this problem. It only helps characters who are running DECAL for self buffing, and only those characters who are high enough in level to be three school mages casting level 7 spells in all three schools, in addition to their other skills. The goal of the "Nerf Buffing Solution" is to have many characters be able to divorce themselves from buff bots. As long as buff bots are widely used, AC 1 is addicted to DECAL, and you designers better get used to that.
#2. Change the Low Level Fellowship rules so that XP can be shared all the way from Level 1 to Level 50. Thanks to buffing and the general way Dereth is laid out now, the sub-50 game is pretty much a joke, anyway. Within the last year I've rerolled three characters, and all three times the only question I faced was: How fast can I get this character to 50th level, so I can get into some meaningful fellowships? (The last character took 24 hours of game play, and it was deadly dull hacking and slashing of just one kind of monster, in one place, in one dungeon. <Sigh>) This is not what the sub-50 game should be like, and one of the fixes for the sub-50 game is to let all sub-50's be able to share XP with the XP bonus in tact.
#3. Generally improve the sub-50 game. If your goal is to grow AC, as in... bring in lots of newbie players... then you have to pay more attention to the sub-50 game! This part of the game has to be outstanding! It has to become so good that experienced players will reroll, just so they can reexperience the sub-50 part of the game. The "old hands" can take care of themselves. You, Turbine Designers, have to nurture the newbies. (I think bringing in new blood is a very admirable goal. But one of the painful realities of pursuing newbies this is that you will have to "show some spine" when dealing with your current "whiner" audience, and ignore them for a while.)
#4. Have New PK Lite mode which all the characters are at a "standard" level. Have a mode called @pkstandard. When you pick this form of PKLite, you are rolled back to a standard amount of XP (I suggest that of a 60th level, so that mages can cast level 7's without too many fizzles.) And all the character's attributes and skills are pro-rated back to what they would be with that standard amount of XP (If you are less than 60th, your XP would not be affected.) That way, you can have some PKL contests were there is balanced XP between the contestants.
#5. I'll keep saying it: control your inflationary tendencies. With each "improvement" to armor, weapons and monsters, you are obsoleting all your past good work. I read in your March 04 letter that some players were complaining that with the new loot valuations they couldn't keep their mages in tapers and platinum scarabs.
Your answer to that should not be, "Oh Dear! We'll look into that and make sure there's plenty of expensive loot next month."
It should be, "Excellent! Scarcity is now a part of Dereth. This is one way we are curbing our own inflationary tendencies. If you need more money, go kill a monster and collect some loot, instead of spending all your hours on PKLite."
Scarcity should become a part of the Dereth landscape. This is the most direct way to control inflation. There should be random shortages and surpluses. Characters should have to move around a bit and "bring home some bacon" to maintain a smoothly running clan or monarchy.
I say again: your goal is to create an environment, then back off and let the players figure out how to manipulate it. Don't be "social directors" and lead players by the nose to everything they need. Don't try to "balance" mages and melees and archers. Let them be what they are, and let the players decide what to play based on what they are. If you want to do some balancing, use paper-sizzors-rock as your paradigm, not mano-a-mano Old West gunfighter duels.
Doc Feelgood, March 04
January 2005
AC is dead. "The suits" at Microsoft were right when they sold AC to Turbine, and Turbine was not able to prove them wrong. It's an experience I know well because I had a similar dispute with my publisher when they stopped printing my first book. "What?" I said, "There's still thousands of people who are using WordStar and don't have my book yet!"
I put my money where my mouth was, and bought two boxes of books from the publisher, and advertised... and I had most of those two boxes of books until I threw them away two years later -- "the suits" at the publishing house were right: my book was dead. Now, back to the AC problem.
Housing availability is a wonderful indicator of current AC activity -- much better than total accounts being paid for because it's easy to monitor and house paying is not on any sort of automatic payment plan.
At AC's peak in popularity, during the summer of 2003, all the houses mansions and villas on almost all the servers were owned. On Wintersebb there were about 375 apartments available and on Leafcull an astoundingly small 15 to 50. On Leafcull people paid big resources just to be told where an open apartment was.
Now, in January 2005, there are thousands of apartments available on Leafcull and close to two thousand available on WE, plus houses, mansions, and even the occasional villa (the most popular kind of housing).
All this housing availability means lack of interest. It's a seriously bad sign.
There's another difference I've noticed, too. The "brightest and best" are gone. The people I go with on quests these days don't have nearly the skill that questers did six months ago.
The last year has been an interesting evolution to watch. Clearly when Turbine bought back AC, there was a bet being made: Microsoft was saying, "AC is done. We are cutting bait on it." And Turbine was saying, "No way! There's plenty of life in the old lady, and we're ready to show you just how much!"
So, what did Turbine have in mind that was going to "rock my world" and prove Microsoft wrong? That is still a mystery to me, I haven't seen any sign of it. The mistakes they made are more obvious. Here's a list of what I saw as mistakes over the past year:
My most vivid run-in with this problem came during the "Herr Pie Incident" when another player complained about my choice of a character name. I was decided against, which lead me to seriously research changing from AC to WOW or EQ2. As I examined the fine print on the WOW and EQ2 user agreements, I see they have "learned" from the AC experience, and have tried to eliminate the complaint generating issues from the start: we own it all so you can't sell anything on E-bay, no macroing, we carefully control the names, we own all the pictures you take... and so on. As a result of my research, My choice is: none of the above. I'm getting out of MMRPG's all together.
The original AC (beta, and 2000-era) was much more of a community than a kid's game. People had the power of choice: they could help each other, they could hurt each other, and they could innovate new ways of playing. It was much more exciting, but it lead to a lot of complaining when "hurt" was chosen or another player thought a new way of playing was unfair. They key phrase, though, is "it was more exciting."
Another example: I used to be an ACSpedia and AC Explorer user, and I was a prolific contributor to ACSpedia (which provided the data base for AC Explorer). I contributed materially to the popularity and success of these two products. I was the one who had made over half the entries in the database, and I would get complements from players whenever Doc went somewhere new. In spite of this significant contribution to game popularity, I never heard "word-one" from ACSpedia or AC Explorer people. When these people changed their products, I had to guess what was happening just like everyone else. In 2004, I stopped making the effort to keep up with their changes; I stopped using the products; I stopped contributing, and my enjoyment of the game decreased dramatically.
OK... the party's over.
This is likely to be my final report on Asheron's Call. I've enjoyed it over many years, and that makes me disappointed at how it's evolved. Better luck.... well, just-as-good-luck, next time, guys.
back to Doc Feelgood's Cast and Bash Clinic ... back to Doc Feelgood's on WE