Mansion of the mourned changed?

[Gimlet]

Did someone tweak mansion of the mourned?

after the earlier mess up with crash and code acting weird, there are now 4 centiworms that respawn all over the area...hard to kill there with it hunting and being in rooms u don't expect it to be

[Vixn]

As I've heard at origin centiworm were designed to respawn in the special room with 4 exits (one-way exits). These exits were broken that's why centiworm fell to freezer and stay there untill next crush/reboot. It seems now it's been fixed.


Kida.

[Gimlet]

i don't think u understood my question

there are now FOUR centiworms in the area

[Gimlet]

seriously, if you imms intend to make changes to an existing area, it'd be good and polite to give us a heads up.

making FOUR centiworms wander around mansion isn't fun when u have no way of know where they are prior to entering the area, and the moment you open the door, you can get swarmed by 2 of them who hunt and kill you.

i hope this change wasn't in direct response to the amount of xp I've been doing because the only reason I've been doing so much xp solo is because I've been bed-ridden and on alot the past 2 weeks. Brad on Toxis gained as much xp as I did last week, in ONE DAY of grouping (it was probably like 12 hrs) I don't see group xp being nerfed, or group areas being nerfed.

I rarely rant about changes and nerfs, but this is the 2nd change to mansion. First the coins, then adding extra wandering aggro mobs.

I believe every area should have a room where the player can feel safe, regroup and what not. When the player doesn't even stand a chance at times before he even STARTS, it's kinda silly. Sure i could lite up and kill all the centiworms in the area first. But there have been times where THREE of them wander the same corridor, and it takes about 4-5bolts to kill one now. Taking one out is tough already, taking 2 or 3 out together is virtually impossible.

Bear in mind that other than mattimeo, and one other mob, the xp on mobs in mansion aren't really that high. Rock Scorpions in earth plane die in 1 bolt, and give 300k-400k xp. Rain storms in air plane give 1mil xp and die in 2-3 bolts. Ghosts in xanth give 800k-1mil+ and die in 2-3 bolts. Feel free to nerf these areas too.

Why am i being forced to choose to group? Sure, reward those who choose to group, but why penalize those who choose not to? Because of a medical condition I can't stare at the screen for too long at a time, and frequently need to take time out from playing, I don't wanna group under such circumstances.

Sure, I can choose not to kill in mansion, which I am doing now. But I don't know if they're going to nerf the other areas should I make the same amount of xp this week.

[*Splork*]

This is the second change to Mansion and the reason has more to do with areastats than it does with your player's xp in the last week. I personally had not seen them until just now when I was preparing for this post. Keep in mind, that I did not however make these changes but I agree with them after researching them for the last few hours.

Here is the information regarding the change:

1) Mansion of the Mourned is the #1 mid to high level area(#9 area total) that is run with nearly 9,000 kills. Rarely a reset is missed...
2) With over 9,000 kills, the area had only yielded 72 PC deaths( until the recent changes).
** Bal Harbor Town is nearly as dangerous as Mansion is with 10k mob kills and 60 PC deaths, rather sad
3) The exp yielded per run is around 13-18 million and can be done in less than 2 sancs with close to .008 chance of death.
***A woman has a greater chance of getting pregnant while on birth control and having sex than a player in slothmud has soloing mansion of the mourned. This may be a bad comparison but it certainly should get the point across.
4) exp yielded is 3-5x easier than other xp areas( meaning other exp areas that are in the range of mansion have 3-5x the pc death ratio

Its should be quite apparent to everyone, this area needed to be tweaked. We have made the area harder because we feel its ok to reward great exp as long as there is a nice risk factor. We are hoping that the additional danger changes fullfill our requirements.

The area has been on our radar since the inception of the new SlothMUD. Areastats is one way we determine which areas need to be adjusted. There will always be areas that will need some type of change.

Im sorry I did not post earlier but work has been extremely time consuming and tiring, my time for Sloth has been greatly reduced and I am trying to use what I have accordingly.

Enjoy,
Splork

[Gimlet]

thanks for your post splork

i apologise if i souded like i was accusing anyone of trying to mess the game up for us, I was jut ranting coz I was caught off-guard

i really appreciate all the work everyone's putting into the game

keep up the good work....great work i mean

[Atwell]

[quote="*Splork*":zgmbbxm6]2) With over 9,000 kills, the area had only yielded 72 PC deaths( until the recent changes).
** Bal Harbor Town is nearly as dangerous as Mansion is with 10k mob kills and 60 PC deaths, rather sad
3) The exp yielded per run is around 13-18 million and can be done in less than 2 sancs with close to .008 chance of death.[/quote:zgmbbxm6]

It makes sense to inform decisions like this area change with data like the above. However, treating all PC deaths equally yields unreliable results. A new 40-prime catching up on later classes might well accept corpsing 5 times, losing a few million each time, to get 100M exp total. A high 5x40 trying to hit his 6x40 level would never think of doing so; he would lose several times the 100M from the corpses. A level-10 character loses no exp from corpsing, so his calculation is again entirely different. Since a death in a group context usually means a raise attempt, the amortized cost of a group death is only 5-15% that of a lone solo death. When the soloist has an expectation of summoning help upon death, the cost falls somewhere in between. You must weight each PC death to account for its specific cost.

For all those reasons, a comparison to Bal Harbor is especially risky. A lot of killing in Bal Harbor is likely from low-level players trying out their abilities; death costs them little. You also have groups running mayor-galio who can raise their dead and therefore take chances. Mansion of the Mourned has a different player profile. A player determines the mansion works well for him, then runs it with great precision as an exp factory. They learn quite precisely how much each mob takes and deals and determine to minimize undue losses.

Taking the median of your run exp range, 15.5M, and the count of mobs in the area normally killed every run, 20, the average exp per kill is 775K. If we suppose the cost of corpsing at 50M exp (perhaps a player in the final run up to 3x40), the corpse rate at which a player breaks even is .0155. That's only double the death rate you measured, and no player would run an area expecting to barely recoup corpsing losses. It seems that players who die in Mansion of the Mourned get raises fairly consistently to make it profitable at a death rate this *high*.

I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the change was right, only on the analysis behind the data-driven justification.

[Gimlet]

that's a good point which I brought up over gossip

I've died my fair share in mansion, and usually i don't even wait for someone to come along and rescue me.

However, I do make sure that I don't run the risk of dying all that often, sinec I'm a crunchy mage. I've run the area enogh times to know how much mana I need for the mobs that do have a chance of killing me, and how many bolts each mob should take. If I find my mirrors broken and my hp running too low for safety, i either recall or flee, heal up and mirror up and go back to kill it.

People in groups, however, just die if they're low. Fleeing and recalling midfight is frowned upon.

I do agree that every area should have a level of danger, and this does indeed make it more fun rather than the usual monotonous hacking and slashing and blasting.

[jezer]

Why don't you use mansion as a template for good areas that work?

What do your stats tell you about Perseverance?

[Gimlet]

umm my msg got cut off it seems

what i was saying is I'm all for increasing danger in areas, but is it possible to increase the chance of death without decreasing the chance of surviving? make the mobs inside harder, etc...

putting 4 of the same mob that is perma hunt and perma aggro is a bit OTT. not to mention they hit like a truck and aren't worth the xp.

I did a count of the number of rooms where the centiworms can wander, and there's only 9 of them. 4 wandering, hunting aggro mobs in 9 rooms, IS excessive if u asked me. not to mention that the rooms are pretty much split up into 4 one section and 5 the other, and the centiworms can't cross over. So there's even basically a chance for 4 of them to be in one section tho I haevn't encoutered that. The worst I've encoutered is 3 in the 5-room section.

[Gimlet]

so yeah, been trying various tactics when doing mansion now...

there's 3 centiworms respawned in the 2nd section past the closet

that section is un-doable until a reboot/crash i suppose

how am I supposed to kill 3 centiworms together?

nearly killed me both times i tried

I'm not complaining, just giving feedback on what it's like now

[Bennett]

Some people don't like to group and prefer to go it alone. Heaven forbid it be possible to sort of keep up with those who loaf in bh xp groups.

[Thraxas]

[quote="Bennett":3bex9ckm]Some people don't like to group and prefer to go it alone. Heaven forbid it be possible to sort of keep up with those who loaf in bh xp groups.[/quote:3bex9ckm]

Groups give more xp than solo. Not sure why that should be so but it is.

Personally I dislike most groups because they're boring if I know the run and confusing if I dont. I just dont understand why we're forced to join groups if we want to gain xp at a reasonable rate.

Looking at some groups I'd say that for most the time at least half the group is breaking rule 4 ... seems its not enforced for groups, worst that happens is a player is recalled ... perhaps I can similarly break rule 4 while soloing ... both are equally wrong but if I did and was found out I'd be wiped.
(Not asking for permission to bot ... just pointing out an aspect of the discrimination against soloists that exists)

That all said I think it unfair to link this what seems a sensible rebalance of an out of kilter area to nerfing soloing. The balance may not be right yet, but it was wrong before.

T

[*Splork*]

In response to Atwell, I was only attempting to show that we keep stats of everything in this game from areastats, to mobstats, to playerstats, to lost concentration on spells and to skillstats. And because of this, while they are not perfect, it becomes very obvious to us which areas need adjusting UP and which areas may need a little adjusting down. Or what skills and spells need improving, etc.
As for Mayor Galio, he has been killed 42 times since the last reset and only 2 PCs have been killed:)
I simply cant compare other areas to the mansion because the other exp areas in the mansions range are hit 1/4 to 1/5 the times the mansion has and most of those zones have at least triple the death ratio.

This adjustment was nothing more than getting an area back inline with the rest. For those of you who have been around since the rebirth of SlothMUD, we have done very little adjusting of areas and this is the way we would like it. We tried to remain in the thinking that giving back to the players is better than taking away but sometimes this is simply not the case, and this was one of them.

As for soloing against group exp, we have made quite a few adjustments in the exp calculator to give back more exp for soloers and small groups and Im pretty sure you guys are aware of this. We are listening to you guys and for the most part we are all quite happy, I think....

Enjoy,
Splork

Thraxas and Wimpy have sent me emails recently and hopefully I can take a few of their ideas and implement them soon.

[Bennett]

[quote="*Splork*":1cqrpkns]
As for soloing against group exp, we have made quite a few adjustments in the exp calculator to give back more exp for soloers and small groups and Im pretty sure you guys are aware of this. We are listening to you guys and for the most part we are all quite happy, I think....
[/quote:1cqrpkns]

Thanks for the adjustments, though I can't say I have noticed any significant change in my solo xp. I'm pretty sure that the 25 people following Toxis around right now are running xp laps around me, despite my best efforts at hitting mobs by myself.

It is entirely possible, however, that I just suck.