General post to all

[Teron]

I've had that counter for myself for years and it's very imprecise.

For example:
Vicious: 447 (9%), brutal: 156 (3%), massacre: 3117 (65%), extremly hard: 945 (19%), wiff: 56 (1%).
Total damage: 118249+ with 27 per hit so far

That 27 avg dam per hit is very imprecise, it's based on minimum damage. It could be 30, and I wouldn't know it.

Suppose I can see massive crit hits and disregard chops as well.
Were any of vicious attacks done, when mob was morted?
Was that vicious 71 or 100 after a brutal stab?

If a player hits a brutal for 32 damage, the same brutal could've done 69 damage, and I wouldn't have known it.

I haven't been using this counter forever.

[*Splork*]

JB has posted to TMC regarding showing exact damage per attack.

I was going to respond here but there is no sense in responding twice. Here is the link to my response:
http://www.mudconnect.com/SMF/index.php?topic=80583.0

Maybe we can find some middle ground? One option would be to remove most of the randomness from work experience? Maybe you guys can think of something else...

[Josiah]

Here's a middle ground suggestion:

Add total damage dealt to the new 'counters' command. Probably just two data points: total damage dealt, and average damage per round. That would give us a good idea of how effective we are, without adding potentially spammy damage counters to every line of combat.

Mages and Thieves would be able to see their damage precisely by splorking a mob, and players in a group could track their effectiveness over a longer duration.

The numbers would only be available to players that care, and wouldn't be pushed on anyone who doesn't want the information.

I also agree with forum guy on mudconnect, code obscurity is a bit old fashioned.

[Teron]

A number of options would fit in the "not revealing the mysterious stats" criterion, such as:

You contributed x % of group damage
You healed x % of group heals
You received x % of group damage

Also, if the argument is that it's too spammy, make the players decide with a toggleable command.

Splork, what happened to:

"Immortals run things past all of us because we have 25 years of experience to draw from. I don't even think I've vetoed anything in years, I now simply tell people what I think will happen and say go for it and good luck
If an Immortal wants to bring any of the ideas they see here to our admin team, they are free to do so and it would be discussed. "

viewtopic.php?f=28&t=4682&p=37437#p37442

[*Splork*]

That is exactly what is going on. The discussion is actively taking place and no decision has been made. I've received opinons from three other Immortals at this point and 2 have similar views that I do,
I've summarized a few of them in the TMC post.

Which is why we are trying to find something we can all be happy with.

Now thats what the quote box is for. Quoting something that people actually say...

[Filk]

I dont think that any middle compromise it posible here. If you reveal something, you actually reveal all. With enough data about any round or combat, we could gather statistic about pretty much details. It just makes this harder and available for good scripters only.
So discussion didnt change my point of view - all damage should be revealed. Dixi.

Only reason against it i think is worth something, is big flow of questions about inner formulas.
But that reason seems silly to me, because if we have output of that black box, we could test all that by ourselves. And any newbie never would ask on forum about that, if players ingame could answer on most of their questions.

All ideological reasons about "thats not our old good times blabla" are nothing, if you ask what ppl expect to see in modern game.

[Hung]

Filk, +100
I would also add that if potential flow of question about damage calculation could be a problem. There is an administrative solution. I.e. such questions to immorts could be forbidden. And violators turned into donkeys. Problem solved.

[Gorka]

I'm a fan of getting integers blasted at me... especially positive integers. I'd play sloth in binary mode if you gave me the chance. The progressive and numerical eq system was what attracted me to sloth. I've always found combat tedious - you hit something hard / you hit something very hard... unexciting due to the lack of transparency, the in game puzzles an obstacle of charging ahead, and the social side of the game (grouping) with players who I wouldn't probably be friends with in real life... difficult. (more so in the past) Numbers kept me playing.

I actually feel I might understand where Splork is coming from here. He has history and memories of the game that are precious to him. If you read his post... you can see this... Obviously these are nothing to the new players who are clearly more interested in powering up and world domination, and see the lack of transparency as an obstacle to improvement. Boths points of view are as valid as each other, but Splork's is far more deeper as it feels like changing part of himself, his thinking, his traditions, his history in respect to this game.

We are messing with something here that's deep to some. This is more of a "feeling" matter, and our logical arguments are as useless as warriors slashing at ether mobs with their swords.

If given the chance I would unashamedly vote for an integer on each line of combat in a heartbeat... Numbers improve my gaming experience, put me in control and remove ambiguity... to me that's 1000% better... but if life has taught me something... people in Splork's position, you have to give them space about these decisions because it's deeper for them than for us. Both sides are right.

EDIT: A MUD Administrator has since made this response, which is well worth a read.

http://www.mudconnect.com/SMF/index.php?topic=80583.msg210898#msg210898

[Riurik]

OK so let’s talk realistically:
a) We made a philosophical decision to promote group play over solo play. I am still in contact with many of the older players, and this is the number 1 reason people won’t come back and new people don’t join. Period. I’m back right now, at some point I will leave, and this will be the reason why. Unless you encourage soloing, you will never grow the base. Make certain areas better solo areas, other better group areas.
b) The trend seems to have been to flatten out differentiation between classo, bring it back. Make prime skills stronger, make prime only spells and skills stronger.
c) Bring back some of the danger. That may sound conterintuitive, but being killed by the sundew and the man on the north road are part of the game.
d) The game does not stand alone, the game and the website/s are a combined experience, and frankly the website needs a lot of work. The EQ List looks like it was designed by a developer, the functionality is very cool but highly arcane and unusable. The wiki is not really a wiki in that none updates it. Try to find the ingredients for any of the thief spells, or the potions easily.
Registration on the site is a nightmare. It has tighter registration security than a bank website. Unless you are an Avatar you have no idea what spells are Avatar spells but that is the Gotcha, so the message is we don’t want new players registering comment. In addition, the mechanism calls you for to drag the spells, but lowlighted text infers you have to leave the correct spells on the left, not drag them to the right. Again, an unusable UI.
If you lose your password you have the remember both your username (that you may have registered years ago,) and password, so it tells you the username password combo is not valid, but if you try register a user with that email it tells you it is in use. The new registration feature never sent an email confirmation, so I had to dig back through my secondary email for the username.
There is no mobile website and most users want a mobile website. Trying to navigate the website on a phone just plain sucks.
So, numbers 1 and 2, sort out the website and create a mobile version. Yes I know of players we have lost because of this.
e) Remove the algorithms that penalize you for killing the same areas over until you hit 1x40. Again if I want to solo play levelling up below 40 is hard.
f) Make tri tokens able to roll better stats, guarantee a range, cap the top higher than they are now with some chance of going over the range, not as high as hexes. Believe or not lots of people like rolling for stats, triangular tokens are useless now as anything other than a safety net.
g) Simplify the game structure, it is simply confusing. If you are going to have a newbie graveyard, just have them come back with all their EQ and go up to go to the gate they died on, the whole grab your corpse and follow the beckoning figure thing is simply annoying.

[Josiah]

There's some good points in there. I'm only going to talk about g)

Yes, dying could be simpler and less painful for newbies. They used to leave corpses on the ground, which is too punishing when they live on a continent that most players can't get to. Eventually though, they'll need to learn to go find their corpse and get their stuff. The design purpose behind requiring them to 'get all tomb' is probably to help them learn how things work in a less punishing environment.

Corpse retrieval at any levels is rather hardcore compared to modern games, but you said in point C that players like risk. Perhaps we could think of some interesting alternatives to corpses getting looted. For instance, who would be interested in signing up for an optional life insurance racket where you can pay NPCs to safeguard your stuff? If you corpse more than 5 rooms away from a recall point, and there are no living members of your group in the room when you die, then they charge you ~5000 coins per level to retrieve your eq for you, and you'd have to wait 4 minutes for them to bring it back to town. It could be free for lowbies, and a nice transition from the deus ex machina of the graveyard to the harsh reality of the Struggle. The cost is high enough to be a legitimate risk.

On the other hand, CRs are one of the places where our players currently shine in supporting each other. I've never seen anyone politely ask for CR help and not receive it.

[*juggleblood*]

Hi Riurik!

On prime differentiation, that was decided when we went to the 9 class system and is not getting reversed. It's differentiated enuff, while still pushing people to strive for 9x40.

On the graveyard, I think it's a definite improvement for newbs, but I do see room for improvement. Newbs are a little slow the first couple times, but after that there's no problem. One issue is that when they appear in the graveyard and get the room descrip, there's nothing there. They don't loot tomb, because they don't see a tomb there to loot. As for the messages giving them directions to altar, I concur that the 10 second timer is annoying and most people will prefer to wander off before they see it. I would suggest just leaving objects along the path that direct them where to go.

On the eqlist, I have to say you're being awfully critical. It's rather great in my opinion. Similary I think you're being awfully hard on the website for free game.

Regarding danger...I don't know what you're talking about. It seems you're just complaining that these 2 particular mobs aren't dangerous enough or you're complaining about the non-aggro against newbies feature. Newbies rather like the non-aggro feature, so I think you're alone on that one. If you just want to be killed by a scarecrow, I can arrange that for you.

Regarding corpse retrieval, I would steadfast stand against any change that makes corpse retrieval easy for non-newbies. It is the number one thing dissuading bots. I suspect this is also related to your complaint that soloing is hard. Anyway, the current balance of solo vs group activity is pretty good.

It appears you haven't been active since 2007 and yet you speak as if you're an expert on the game. Did you come back just to complain and be able to quit again? "This is a game which allows you to be online with other people, having fun." If it's not for you, so be it. We'll still be here when you come back in another 8 years to complain that it's not to your liking.

[Riurik]

An immort slamming a post on the Crier is probably another good reason not to stay here. One of the reasons that the numbers are up at that people like me have returned to try help rebuild the numbers.

No I didn't come back just to complain, and yes I would consider myself an expert in general in the game. I came back because of a post made on the Facebook Sloth Alumni, but having said that where is the active Facebook page? Where is the mobile web app? You want a concrete suggestion? Give me a way to put in my levels and filter for equipment I can wear, and search within that dam eq or mana regen eq. Again, the EQ List was made too complex. I said it had lots of nice functionality, it is just too hard to get what you want easily,

I am regular contact with old players who are friends of mine, and the main reason people have told me they don't come back is that decisions to flatten classo play when the new game in was not something most people liked, and the game discourages soloing. You can bury your head in the sand and ignore that if you like, when I used to play we have 50 to 75 people online. Now the numbers are up and we are lucky if we break 20. The latest Sloth has never had the sustained number the S3 had, work out what was broken with the new version and (generally in terms of why people play)and fix it.

The decisions that where made when we moved to 9 classes lost the player base, and it's not getting refreshed, and that is not just text-based games because other games have 100 to 200 concurrent players. Keeping on doing more of the same will not change anything. The new players we get when everyone goes and votes stay for a week or less, because the game mechanics are too complex and leveling is too slow unless you are in a group, and they go play an other Mud.

But hey, if you want think I just came back to complain go ahead. It always amazes me when managers slam people for raising issues. I think the declining player base says it all.

[*juggleblood*]

Bad analogy. Immortals are not managers, they are players and free content contributors. So yeah, I can tell you to shove it when you post such drivel, because if you really cared so much you could contribute something yourself. There's only so many active coders, of which I am not one btw, and they have jobs and lives. You can't just come in here after an 8 year hiatus and shit on everything and say, that if we did things your way, we'd go back to a 50 person who list. I call bullshit.

...Don't read too much into my strong opinion here. I'm still available on telegram for you for raises and CR. Cheers.

[Riurik]

Bullshit back. I gave thousand of hours of my time over a number of years to this game, I want to see it thrive as much as anyone.

The reality is that we seldom break 20 players. Sometimes in the last year I have logged on and we have had 5 players.

You want to do something to save the game you love? Work out what makes people want to play.

People vote with their keyboards. If we don't have players, it's because they prefer other muds.

And the manager analogy is completely relevant. I can do one of three things - I can play, I can make suggestions of how to build the player base, or I can leave. I don't have the rights to build or code on the mud right now, but honestly even if I did, if what I did was more of the same nothing would change.

In the end this mud won't die because of what players do, it will live or die because of what the immort team does, the people who manage and run the game.

Most newbies are playing a while, and leaving and not commenting. If we had one newbie a month stay and level up with would be 12 regular players over the next year. If we don;t make them want to stay and play they will go elsewhere.

[*Splork*]

The decisions that where made when we moved to 9 classes lost the player base, and it's not getting refreshed, and that is not just text-based games because other games have 100 to 200 concurrent players. Keeping on doing more of the same will not change anything.

This is absolutely, 100% false. I tracked our average number of players for two years before we wiped. The last year of Sloth 3, we averaged 11 players and that number was consistently dropping every year. There was nothing to lose which is why we changed things up. Currently, our numbers are pretty solid, especially for a mud.

Everyone likes to compare us to Aardwolf or Zombiemud and say look, these muds still have 100 players online. That may be true but they used to have 500.

I am certainly not saying we can't do things better because we absolutely can. There is always room for improvement...