KinslayerMUD Forums

i am going to make this one of my more constructive post.

I understand why imms have slowed certain aspects of the mud down such as exp and smobbing of certain eq, to force a player to invest more time in their achievements (in hopes of forcing a player to be on more and possibly create an addict) but you must understand 99% of our player base come from wotmud and those players left for a certain reason and usually that reason is due to how slow the mud is and how much rl time they must invest in order to meet their goals, also a player coming from another mud has dealt with the addiction issue and if they had an addictive personality would continue to play their first mud thus we usually but not always attract casual players, those who are willing to invest a few hours a day but nothing more.

Some players have circumstances on wotmud that forces them to find another mud and when we do have addictive player forced over under such circumstances such as myself our addictive personality keeps us here but when a mud has a ton of issues as this mud has over the last 6 months these hardcore players will find another mud to play, we do not want to push the oldest and the newest of our player base away. I.E. we have already lost our casual players.

When these players come over they should not be met with a mud on par with wotmud but have their anticipations and ideals of a mud realized and I realize these are my ideals but the majority of the player base as well. This should be a mud that is much faster in character developments such as exp, smobbing, clanning, ranking etc etc than any wot themed mud online.

We already beat wotmud hands down as far as our imms and their character and interaction.

The mass amount of changes this mud has seen over the last 6 months has ran our player base away as well, I understand the need for some of these changes but most people like that which is familiar, it is human nature and when everything begins to change people begin to feel alienated.

We need to worry about bugs and not adding anything new besides quest, people seem to always love new quest. find a constant for the mud such as finalizing all remorts and balancing them, we will never find a happy medium but we can find an unbiased balance and eventually this balance will become a constant.

love how the imms and addicts ignored this post, guess I gave out to much game administrative info.

I agree with the xp part, but the statting is really easy now (I will restat to 19 17 14 19 20! GRRRR)

I've been wondering myself where the big group smash pk from May/June went. July has been the pk Sahara. I haven't responded because I honestly don't have any constructive opinions about the problem of player numbers, except to say that some as well as myself may have things come up irl that interfere with one activity or another. I have not played here all too long, and haven't posted on the forum much because I'm not an experienced pker of over a year like many of our players. I can't relate to a post about things being slower either, because I haven't played here very long, but I am sure things were faster. I remember pkmud from ages ago, but only vaguely.

Its just because it is summer. Plus at one point any weapon other than a master or rare was worthless vs dodge a while back. (See any abs weapon). New quests help but theres also a new one out and I doubt anyones even tried it.

Does anyone even know if it's active??

I went all over the mud looking for it already.

Chase wrote:Its just because it is summer. Plus at one point any weapon other than a master or rare was worthless vs dodge a while back. (See any abs weapon). New quests help but theres also a new one out and I doubt anyones even tried it.

"Just Think"? I did make some attempts, but I couldn't figure it out. Plus, I don't play LS very often because I haven't been able to figure out mercs and smobbing and the char I have is pretty much naked.

I came here from wotmud cause Monsta said it was awesome, and it was!
What attracted me was how easy it was to do stuff, like statting and exping and smobbing, clanning.

What drove me away and whats keeping me away is all the gdamn changes. I really dont like them, theres too many all at once. This means Im forced to change the way I pk or change my setups, repractising and I hate it, I dont want to go thru all that. I stopped smobbing cause controlling those mobs were more hassle than they are worth and I miss Danir!

Why not just fix what you have now? What you had before was fine and dandy, and stop adding things or at least give it a break. I just wanted to play the game.

Could you be more specific in your description of your problems with 'changes' you find annoying/negative Summer?

If there are any building concerns that you'd like to bring up, as well as any creative ideas you may have, please put them here or pm me with them.

Jenkin wrote:as well as any creative ideas you may have, please put them here or pm me with them.

No offense but this is the issue we have been speaking of, creative ideas baring fruition continuously and the causal player logging on a month to six months later feels alienated because nothing is as they remember it.

Let's deal with bugs, balance issues, and poor scripting then consider new ideas please.

No offense but this is the issue we have been speaking of, creative ideas baring fruition continuously and the causal player logging on a month to six months later feels alienated because nothing is as they remember it.

Let's deal with bugs, balance issues, and poor scripting then consider new ideas please.

I remember back when there was just small balance tweaks every so often, that was awesome, pk was regular, really only repracced when you wanted to try a different setup.. then repracs happens globally every few days, new weaves, weave nerfs, bash changes, removing self-str(this caused me alot of rage) db buffs, so many changes so often, adding new things and all the chaos that ensued whenever they had to re-balance the new balance...

it's all been said a million times already!

Alder wrote:Could you be more specific in your description of your problems with 'changes' you find annoying/negative Summer?

Basically if you look into the Announcements thread, its all that:P And they are so frequently added. Specifically the changes that effect the players like Weapons, bash, dodge, combo, kick, pstrike etc. I understand that sometimes you gotta make adjustments. Small adjustments in small doses would be better and not so overwhelming for the player. Things like herbs quests the horses are great though.

I come back after a little break and came to find that my set up totally sucked haha, read the forums and thought "Oh my word" a slap in the face it was! Alienated isnt the word to describe it for me, more like obselete:P

Yeah, those changes are mostly done outside of whatever small balance tweaks are still needed. But those things take time to surface (and time to fix!), so don't expect them too frequently.

my biggest pet peeve is when a change is made - even a small one - without an announcement. Its made me paranoid to the point that if something i expect to happen doesn't i go and test it to see if a change was made.

For instance, i'm fairly certain someone tinkered with the Yew spear and didn't tell anyone. However i have no way of knowing if my paranoia is founded on anything. its rather... annoying

Evilina wrote:

Jenkin wrote:as well as any creative ideas you may have, please put them here or pm me with them.

No offense but this is the issue we have been speaking of, creative ideas baring fruition continuously and the causal player logging on a month to six months later feels alienated because nothing is as they remember it.

Let's deal with bugs, balance issues, and poor scripting then consider new ideas please.

Your reply has nothing to do with my post. I work to improve existing zones and questing. Fogel is your man for balance, Alder for scripting. Throw me your problems with zones, quests as well as any creative ideas you may have concerning any of the above. This could take the form of an odd quest mob reaction, a typo/bad grammar, ideas concerning the kind of quests you want for your clan, a cool idea for a quest that you came up with but don't want to bother writing it all out yourself...the list can go on as long as you want.

You see, while parts of this game may indeed reach an equilibrium (a balance), MUDs that aren't just talkers, edmuds or Godwars bloodfests are typically populated by more than one type of player who will eventually want the game to evolve just as his or her character does.

Try to imagine someone who isn't numbers oriented (wps, qps, hps, mvs, def, bmi) who sees their character more like an action figure than a precision weapon. They're the kind who go nuts over quest-only items, unlockable subskills, ability trees, secret clans and areas, etc etc. These guys want new stuff - or want the old cool stuff back in the game. Ya know? Maybe you're not that kind of player, but it doesn't mean this MUD can't accomodate players who want to zone out doing that stuff instead of getting squeezed through the meat grinder. Also, people want steady pk and steady qps - what better way than having those wandering explorers, questers and achievers out in the world? Food for the wolves...

I really like the idea of skill trees, I messed around on one mud that had a weapon mastery for each weapon, and when you reached a certain lvl you could get it and it would open up a huge set of skills unique for that class of weapon.

Ifrit wrote:For instance, i'm fairly certain someone tinkered with the Yew spear and didn't tell anyone. However i have no way of knowing if my paranoia is founded on anything. its rather... annoying

http://www.kinslayermud.org/forums/view ... f=2&t=4875
If there were any other changes to the weapon, they were unapproved. I'll compare it to my records later today to verify.

Evilina wrote:...creative ideas baring fruition continuously

New features aren't conceived on Monday, designed on Tuesday and implemented on Wednesday.

Each addition must undergo a process of discussion that involves the scrutiny of the person in charge of whatever that change involves. Next, its tested, debugged/proofread and audited. In the event that everything is green lighted whoever has the final say can let that change either become part of the game at that particular moment, or not. Unauthorized changes are removed.

Jenkin your original post about creative ideas was rather vague so I didn't know which field if any one specific you were speaking of.

I certainly understand your point of a mud and a player evolving but both don't happen hand in hand unless the coding has held back a players character achievements and goals. The coding must be more advanced than the character so the player has the opportunity to develope the character whether by exploration, socializing or numerical gains.

Try to imagine someone who isn't numbers oriented (wps, qps, hps, mvs, def, bmi) who sees their character more like an action figure than a precision weapon. They're the kind who go nuts over quest-only items, unlockable subskills, ability trees, secret clans and areas, etc etc. These guys want new stuff - or want the old cool stuff back in the game. Ya know? Maybe you're not that kind of player, but it doesn't mean this MUD can't accomodate players who want to zone out doing that stuff instead of getting squeezed through the meat grinder. Also, people want steady pk and steady qps - what better way than having those wandering explorers, questers and achievers out in the world? Food for the wolves...

Everything you just listed there are great ideas our player base has been needing for a long time, the key to implementing these ideas is to do them slowly one at a time. Test them out on the test mud but don't use imms exclusively as testers, use people who are creative thinkers in their own right to test the code and try to break it, then use creative pkers like Ifrit to test balance issues.

Once the coding is not only completely bug free but balanced as well imp it and request genuine feed back, not every idea is a good one and sometimes we have to admit maybe this wont work out as planned, an imm has to be able to handle constructive criticism otherwise they just encourage yes men.

Lastly Post the change or implementation and allow the player base to become acclimated to it before adding any additional changes.

Also, people want steady pk and steady qps - what better way than having those wandering explorers, questers and achievers out in the world? Food for the wolves..

This isn't wotmud, our psychological dogma is more moral and complex, if a player is leveling, questing, etc and not actively seeking pk or in a pk zone they are usually left alone. Most players will tell you it's not worth gaining a few qps by possibly alienating another player.

Each addition must undergo a process of discussion that involves the scrutiny of the person in charge of whatever that change involves. Next, its tested, debugged/proofread and audited. In the event that everything is green lighted whoever has the final say can let that change either become part of the game at that particular moment, or not. Unauthorized changes are removed.

In a perfect mud this would be true but here it is not, as an example I watched Koradin imp bows, several bow skills and projectile coding. I am sure he had permission and more than likely Galnor did the coding but that doesn't change the fact that these new skills were not well tested and were horribly unbalanced. Koradin did work hard to balance these issues but the damage had already been done, such as Ifrit killing Syrik in under a second by spam throwing 20 projectiles, he did this weeks after the new changes to projectiles were originally introduced.

Implementation on average is not the main issue, I'd say the main issue would be the continual changes to constants within the game, one week a certain something just sucks and the following week it is over powered, I do realize that usually these changed are made because the majority of the player base has requested them but in all honesty we need to slow down on these changes.

As an example in 03 or 04 I started bugging galnor to make kick interrupt bash on %, 5-6 years later this happened but within a six month time frame about 4 other things were imped that did something similiar. Basically to much to fast especially considering how little change this mud had been exposed to.

To set the record straight, I'm looking at this thread and gathering that it is referring to pk/equipment/balance topics. Correct me if I'm wrong.

fix all the scripting shit that died

Yes alder I was speaking purely from a pkers perspective.

The last time they slowed down the game the population went from 20+ on high to about 3.