2022 Push - Thoughts on the state of the game

[Fujin]

First i'd like to say, thanks for the hard work that gets put into this game by Winter, Rhalin and Greater. I think no other MMUD tries to stick to the essence that is the game like GMUD does while also improving the game and as a player, I truly appreciate what ya'll do for the game. Personally I'd like to bring up a few things about the game that I thought were good, bad, ugly and just speak my mind on the state of the game in an attempt to help provide some constructive feedback and possibly help improve the game.

The first thing I'd like to mention is base stats and their values/importance & affect on race choices. I personally believe the value of agility due to the sheer number of things affected by it make it considerably more valuable of a stat for nearly every class, casters it being primarily a defensive stat rather than an everything stat like it is for melee. Strength is only beneficial to maintain your encumbrance, the damage scaling from it compared to what you see on gear, makes it laughable as an investment choice outside of maintaining ENC unless you have no other stat to raise.  With agility being one of the highest valued stats for most players, This affects race choice considerably. Personally I think each race has a pretty good use case except half-ogre. H-ogre's are the one race that were seen as that giant lumbering oaf that hits slow but hard, and are considerably more tanky when looking at other races, I don't feel this really fits them anymore due to how valuable agility and subsequently dodge are. Whether its some of the stat value needs to be redistributed or h-ogres themselves need a little love, I'd say maybe a little of both but nothing considerably drastic. I can lay out numbers and stat values/weights but tldr is agility has way too much going for it and hogres min/max stats make it a dead race choice in comparison to other races.

Second thing being item power and mob spell variety. The one specific example this push is snakeskin boots. They were straight up made near worthless and no longer protect from the poison they were originally designed to help the player with, and make mermex (and some other low level poison areas) less deadly(I'm assuming that was the items intent by the poison it blocked(83)) all because Mermex's poison 83, is used some 20?ish(I think i counted like 22 before i stopped long ago) times across monsters spanning levelling ranges 15-70. I personally think poison spells should be re-addressed in the game and given level range uses based on the type, rather than overusing/taxing one specific spellID causing low level items to unintentionally spike in power. This particular issue led to making thornflayers an avoid/unscriptable area because of the changes made there.

I can't personally expound on the third thing which would be witchy's getting pigeon holed into one spot repeatedly while leveling. Reveal, Cash, Dij and Masta can give more info about this as they experienced it this push.

Fourth is dupe requirements. I personally think making dupes being required at 60 was a great change and would like to see it actually moved to level 70/75 so that the realms are less crowded for longer, it becomes a choice of power leveling the dupe or maintaining a leaderboard spot and it promotes people at keys/working together for boss chasing longer, which continues the liveliness of the realm. Once dupes come into play and especially when both toons hit that 70+ range, realm activity dies off and overcrowding happens because of perceived/actual limited choices for scripting.

The new 200 runic spells - magic/magic classes. I think this is a neat idea and added value to hybrids but also made them completely outclass some of the pures(at least when talking warlock/gypsy/mage.) which should never be a thing, in DND a hybird is never better than a pure class type in whatever field of specialization they're in, it just doesn't make sense. Now, maybe thats just the magic system or the beginnings of class/spell adjustments that need to be made, showing itself in this push but a gypsy shouldn't be able to sleep mobs better than a pure mage, when its a mage's spell. Now if the classes were moving to something like: gypsy's are debuffers, warlocks are buffers and mages are cannons... then its probably just a reassignment of spells or a rebuild of the magic class system showing its necessity.

The Boat travel levels & fee's. I think Ista and Fuego's level requirements should be reduced, kingsport really hurt them as zones. I know Fuego has more in the works but while it can be a good hiding spot for PVP and there is some ok exp to be had there, the level requirement makes the zone obsolete when compared to what else is available at those levels. As far as Ista, its kind of in the same boat as fuego but not as bad considering it has 2 (out of the 3) bosses there that are worthwhile. With that being said though, I think between those 3 bosses some of the loot should be redistributed to make doing the ice troll boss worthwhile, as i see it there is no point in killing him other than for that busted plate helm.

room stacking was absolutely awwwwwwwwwwfffffffffuuuuullllllllllllll this push. Rooms never unstacked themselves and would just straight pile in if anyone sprinted their way through like a tonka truck, especially at zone seperations. Entrance to upper deeps, rugged plateau spots, dwarven guards in khaz/red tunnels, the dwarven mines themselves are a few places that come to mind where it was just awful with how extra spicy it was, with no real unfucking it unless a mage came along.

Baenglen's design is completely asymmetric and has a boss with the most valuable chest in the game as its sole drop source. On PVE and PVP this is incredibly easy to guard and hold onto, and with it being the only source of this one chest, i think it should be changed. Either lengthen the burning bar outrun and make it bi-directional or open up the eastern baen exit to bidirection or build up the town to be a little bigger, this is the only town in the game that has exactly 1 way to gain access. As a side note, there is absolutely no warning or room descriptions on the cart path indiciating you're about to get buttfucked in the mouth by the cart path trap, usually there is some kind of indicator whether openly or discreet differences... idk how much this matters considering most people just MME it and see it anyway, i just felt it was annoying that you hit some kinda cart trap and there was no description indicators subtle or not and you just have to PRO and check your room to see where it is on mme.

and lastly the value of cash and it's overabundance. In the early game, you have to play smart and work together with friends / gang members to ensure you get cash adjusted around used wisely. it truly affects your quality of life and smoothness of gameplay and matters considerably when you can pickup a few plat here or there and shop an item or buy new spells and even the cost of training early seems expensive. Once you start getting in (trying to recollect here from months ago) the like, 40's and 50's... cash flows considerably... so much so, that it just doesn't matter anymore, training costs no longer matter, there isn't really anything in the shops to buy anymore or at least in enough quantity that affect your cash and it just continually stacks higher and higher. I wanna say by the time i was 60 i had like 1200 runic and I didn't even have the most cash in the gang, it was just worthless. There was nothing that made me go "oh, shit, i cant just blow all this cash on hookers and blackjack." like you had in the early game/early mid game. The one thing that might help is if teleport tokens weren't all the same price, whether it was the lower level requirement ones cost less, or they scaled in cost like training does with your level, plus making training costs a little more to scale with the curve of cash flow or adding some potions that are more available than the arly potions, at the mid/later levels, that can provide buffs like smite or blur, idk... something to that kind of effect that'd make you want to spend money... like being able to buy a really expensive hour long buff of poison immunity. Spitballing here.

These are my thoughts on this push, I'm sure others have other things they noticed and thanks again for keeping the game going.

[Fujin]

I forgot to add in to the boat travel and fee's part, but maybe expand the ice worms and add a worm boss... and along with adjusting the levels of the boatrides, also adjust the costs it plays into the part about cash. By the time you can even take those trips, the cash cost doesn't really matter(if i'm remembering it correctly). I had more but when I was sorting my thoughts, work kicked my ass.

[Reveal]

I can chime in here as well. I think there has been a significant amount of work done for Witchunters this push, from both a gear and quest standpoint. There are competitive scripting spots where the game can support multiple witchunters until basically level 60, when the first witchy that hits that can move into manaspring and will have a clear 1m an hour lead on the rest of the witchies, which means they'll hit 75 first and can move into white bishop and make over 15m an hour, while the next 3 witchunters can hover around 10m in alabaster palace.

that's the one thing that i think witchies can benefit from, more 60+ scripting options. i think lamian bathhouse on talk'iran has some great potential as an option if we added some more rooms and cranked up regen for instance.

as for the gypsy piece, tbh i didn't really use slep after i got it, was big on frailty though. maybe it's got more pvp uses?

i also think scaling the price of tokens would be a great idea, maybe back to 5 plat for silvermere/rhud, 10 plat for khaz, 25 for lost city, 50 plat for blackwater, a runic for kingsport, something like that.

[Swan]

Just want to throw in that PVP absolutely fucking sucks in this game. You can just hang up and never die unless someone wants to camp. You can even get saved by other players out of PVP range of the attacker. I can't think of a game that has worse PVP than this game in its current state. I played for months, got to level 70, built a char for PVP, looked for fights,  killed 1 person, and died at keys 1 time. 3 months of game time for 2 kills / deaths is abysmal. I came to this game to try PVP, and that's all the action I got. I really can't blame anyone but the devs of this game for not supporting PVP in a PVP realm. People should be dying regularly.

My suggestion is that if you have been online less than an hour, you face a HIGH hang penalty, maybe 40%. After one hour, the hang penalty is removed. This lets you script safely but when you log back in, you stay online or die.

[Farmer]

Early/mid game engagement -
I enjoy the reduced xp for some of the early game non-align quests. I believe this reduction should be applied to more/all non-align quests to draw out the early/mid game content.

Dupe timing -
I agree with what Fujin said about when duping begins and would like to expand that topic a bit with the point that class/race combos with low xp tables get to dupe significantly earlier than those with higher tables. A kang witchunter needs around 1.5 billion xp for lvl 60 whereas a dark-elf mystic needs 2.4 billion. A difference of about 900 million xp. For lvl 75 that difference balloons to 2.8 billion xp. I feel that the higher xp table is meant to buy class/race abilities and shouldn't present as an additional barrier to duping. Changing the dupe requirement from a lvl check to an xp check would help to normalize dupe timing for all class/races. To keep this suggestion in line with Fujin's point, I would recommend a 6 billion xp requirement to dupe. This would be approximate lvl 75 for a class/race with a 235% xp table - close to the average across all combinations.

Farm timers -
I'm sure many noticed the distinct lack of bosses during much of the early push. That is largely my fault and is due to how easy it is to run timers and manage boss spawns. The 10% early spawn does help make it more difficult to manage, but it's still too easy. Expanding this to include a 10% late regen timer would make it much more difficult. This might look something like 10% chance to spawn at 90% regen +3% chance for every 1% regen up to 99%, so 99% regen would be 37% chance to spawn. at 100% it would jump to 70-80% chance to spawn, then an additional 2-3% chance for every 1% regen past that up to 100% chance at 110% regen.

Farm cycling -
Additionally, some regen times are just too easy to manage across a 24 hour cycle. If I kill dark-elf queen at 5am EST every day, it's unlikely that I'll lose that timer for a very long time due to when the majority of players are active. This is similarly true for 8 hour and 12 hour timers, although those are a little more exposed. To that end, I would recommand modifying 8, 12, 24, 48 hour timers and others that fall in these ranges to the top or bottom of 7 or 9, 10 or 14, 20 or 28, 44 or 52 hours. This would help force timers off of natural management cycles and create more exposure for those bosses.

Group encouragement -
Admittedly low priority item here, but I think it would be nice to include group bonuses to encourage grouping. This might look like mob base xp +20% and drop rate +0.5*members for each member (not effective on bosses). So I can try to farm up a 1% drop pixie wings solo and it'll take forever, or I can get 3 buddies and bring that up to 3% = [1%+(0.5x4)] and it'll take 30-40 minutes for all of us.