"Good" versus "Evil"

[Guinex]

A neutral supp would be cool, however with that alignment would need to be changed a bit to fit that. Right now if you kill a good align mob you are instantly evil, on the other side you have to kill 10 extremly evil mobs just to pinch the goodnes. So becoming and balancing neutrality is basically impossible.

[Weasel]

How about some sort of time margin.. ie: you kill a good mob (whether it be on purpose or accidentally) and your alignment changes to evil. Instead of immediately losing your sup, a game generated message could say "you have 5 minutes to revert back to good alignment or your supp is gone".. yes? no? maybe?

[Avatar]

I like both of those ideas, and I hope the imms are watching

For neutral, I was thinking the range from -3 to +3 could all be considered neutral. It seems to be the range where you can't summon good or evil supps. It seems quite possible to balance within those boundaries...at least it seems like my characters frequently wind up there when I'm trying to supp.

[kjartan]

We aren't going to add neutral supplication servants.

We aren't going to adjust things so that you can have a good mob in your run and still maintain a good supplication servant.

The topic of letting you maintain a supplication servant for a few minutes while you went and got an atonement spell because you had screwed up and attacked the wrong mob came up earlier, and I thought the conclusion had been "this hardly ever happens, it's not worth changing". However, if that happens frequently and it's a great burden to lose your supplication mob while you get an atonement cast, I could add that. For instance, the mob could follow you around haranguing you and refusing to help until you atone.

[12345]

It happens quite a bit actually. I'd like to say its usually intentional, but it almost never seems to work out that way.

[brady]

Personally, I really don't understand why you would want to continue running the bh castle day after day. I would prefer reading the tv guide, myself. There are plenty of other areas that can be run for xp with the same size group. Venture out young ruffians! There is a whole world out there...

If it can't kill you back, it ain't worth killing.

[Elsie]

[quote="marchessa_the_red_witch":22pp0w0m]Good mobs should not attack good characters on sight.

It's kind of in the definition of "good".[/quote:22pp0w0m]

I'd take issue with this, good is being true to you're own moral code, if you believe that all kobolds are evil child eating devil worshipping tory voting scum then killing them on sight would seem a (not the) 'good' thing to do.
Whether or not kobolds are that or kitten loving rainbow jumper wearing guitar playing hippies is neither here nor there.

good or evil is always relative to your own stance

[madmax]

[quote="*kjartan*":25626km9]We aren't going to add neutral supplication servants.

However, if that happens frequently and it's a great burden to lose your supplication mob while you get an atonement cast, I could add that. For instance, the mob could follow you around haranguing you and refusing to help until you atone.[/quote:25626km9]

Losing a peri, a eudaemon, or any other low, (single corpse) supplicants are not that big of a deal. However the larger ones, Like the Valkarye, Pit Fiend, Angel, however are. They require much greater effort to get corpses etc.

Personally, I have had a Valkarye in a group, the group mistakenly hit a good aligned mob, and the Valkarye was gone. This does happen frequently when leaders are "learning areas".

On the Valkarye, it seems that it has been changed already. It was mass healing for 140-150 hps greater heal basically. It seems that its proc rate was dramatically reduced and now it is casting a mass cure serious (40 hps)

The auto assist is nice, however, in a group they still steal kills. Maybe a toggle could be added to not have the beast AutoAssist? Similar to the juju's starve option.

If the healing is going to be reduced down to the point it is now, the Valkarye seems useless in groups. It is nice soloing with the three attacks though.

For a 4x40x 30 tard supplicant, I would think mass heal (100 hp) or greater heal (150) should be used. It does run out of mana quickly enough anyway so I'm not sure why it was adjusted so soon anyway.

My thoughts,

Madmax

[marchessa_the_red_witch]

[quote="Elsie":2gk4vge5][quote="marchessa_the_red_witch":2gk4vge5]Good mobs should not attack good characters on sight.

It's kind of in the definition of "good".[/quote:2gk4vge5]

I'd take issue with this, good is being true to you're own moral code, if you believe that all kobolds are evil child eating devil worshipping tory voting scum then killing them on sight would seem a (not the) 'good' thing to do.
Whether or not kobolds are that or kitten loving rainbow jumper wearing guitar playing hippies is neither here nor there.

good or evil is always relative to your own stance[/quote:2gk4vge5]

I'll leave aside the arguments of depraved indifference and negligence - that is simply "doing what you think is right" is only good if you don't have any way of knowing any better, but wrong, and illegal, if you ought to.

On the mud, however, there is an arbiter of good and evil - the mud alignment system. That is, it is possible for good mobs to detect good characters, and evil ones, as well as the converse. The problem is how to make game behavior match game mechanics. Today I was *twice* attacked by a mega-good mob, that is killing it immediately made me "evil", even though I was running at +10 and had a supplicant.

This kind of action is a hack - the mob isn't particularly good or evil, merely that it is defined as "walking into the room with this mob in it gets rid of your good supplicant". As such it calls into question whether alignment is anything other than another number to track and arbitrarily work. The more often the gods put alignment screws (like aggro good mobs that attack good players) the more often players will look at alignment as something to be hacked in return.

Marsup seems not to attack good aligned characters - though I haven't engaged in destructive testing of this notion. It's far better. Good characters who have legitimate business - forges for example - with the alchemists should walk through. Evil aligned characters should have to worry about Marsup, and people with evil intent should watch their backs.

[marchessa_the_red_witch]

[quote:wdylzg4h]Bad orders? The castle isn't exactly a town. Granted, the occasional person passes through on a quest or for a forge, but the vast majority are there to kill and slay.
[/quote:wdylzg4h]

Which will be proved out by their attacking things. The in game solution is to set every mob in the castle with the flag that instantly drops you to evil for killing it. That way, people who are there for "good " reasons have nothing to fear, but as soon as you drop one of the inhabitants - the defenses are alert.

And I'm already working on my "evil castle replacement" proposed area - because if the castle is to be declared good, and thus off limits as a hunting ground for groups that want to keep good alignment - eg pets of various kinds like mounts, supplicants and so on - then there should be a area that fills the same niche in xp and game terms, but which consists of evil mobs.

This is where good and evil ought to differ - while few good mobs should attack good characters on sight - there is nothing wrong with evil characters attacking other evils on sight.

I'll also note that there is no "lawful" versus "chaotic" division of the mud alignment system, though I often think of the alignment system in those terms because it makes more sense than good/evil. I am not sure that Narmer is good with his attitudes, but he sure is lawful alright...

[marchessa_the_red_witch]

[quote="Medios":24b7pd11]I thought originally the castle fighters and knights were aggro. The elites were also aggro? I guess the main complaint is that you cant easily go in there for good corpses, because this argument about groups is nonsense. Unless your soloing this area it doesnt make a bit of difference.

Mike[/quote:24b7pd11]

When we first went into the new castle the fighters were aggro. Once uppon a time knights, elites and fighters were aggro, and squires were wimpy aggro. At this point it seems that only Marsup and the vault are aggro, and Marsup is aggro to evil characters.

Hope that clarifies current experience with the new castle.

As for myself - the changes make it different, but not that different. One needs to dispel more mobs to debuff them, marsup is a pain but can be managed and finally defeated, and the mobs do hit harder, but give out more xp.

Harder for smaller groups, but not really that much more difficult once the group gets going. Marsup is a nasty mob, but largely because he is a blast mob in an area filled with chop mobs, and people were used to going in and chopping in the castle.

[Elsie]

[quote="marchessa_the_red_witch":1ijt28vd]
I'll leave aside the arguments of depraved indifference and negligence - that is simply "doing what you think is right" is only good if you don't have any way of knowing any better, but wrong, and illegal, if you ought to.
[/quote:1ijt28vd]

If you do what you believe to be good then then you are doing good. You can only perform an evil action by knowing that the action is evil.
Good and evil are matters of perspective and can only be so.

Your idea that you can be doing evil by not knowing any better because you ought to know better is quite frankly a nonsense, what if we talk about something where the right course of action is in question?

Mud example of this: you're a 'good' knight in the castle, someone walks in and kills your gate guards, the squires in the courtyard, the crocodiles in the moat and is walking toward you waving a big sword, is the good thing to do:
A: To attack them first and try and save your life?
B: To open negotiations by telling them asking them not to kill you?
C: To run away, desert your post and hide with the kobolds?
D: To build a coalition of the willing guards and swarm the char?
E: To depose the king and declare the char dictator for life?

Hold on a minute this isn;t real life and thats a bit ridiculous ... since when did we start questioning the consistency of the moral code within a computer game?

[Avatar]

"Good and evil are matters of perspective and can only be so."

That's kind of a philosophical response, and I tend to agree with it. On the other hand, most religions (real-life) would not approve of this opinion. Typically, a religion has certain rules and behaviors that they consider "good" or "evil". There is a term "Ignorance of the law is not an excuse" that would apply to most religions as well.

"since when did we start questioning the consistency of the moral code within a computer game?"

On the other hand, this seems like it should be the goal. Games (books / movies / etc.) typically have some level of internal consistency. So, we might say things like spaceships don't make much sense in relation to sloth, while magical swords do. The alignment system (or any of the rules systems) should have some level of internal consistency too. So, there is some value to pointing out or suggesting that certain specific things don't follow some consistency that the rest of the game follows. Of course it's up to the imms to evaluate and determine which to change or not change, but bringing up specific topics for discussion seems to be encouraged by the current admin.

[kjartan]

I haven't noticed any arguments that Sloth's alignment system is inconsistent, just that it's not good-evil symmetric. I don't see any reason it [i:1hwo3dbl]should[/i:1hwo3dbl] be good-evil symmetric; that's what dikus do by default, I guess, but I don't think any real-world moral or philosophical systems claim that good and evil are symmetric.

You can maybe find some in fantasy, e.g. the law-chaos system of the Elric books (which was really just law = good and chaos = evil) was pretty symmetric.

Let's look at Catholicism, that's a popular system. We can map Sloth's good, neutral, evil alignments to "going to heaven", "going to limbo then heaven", "going to hell". There, the system is
- one really evil deed (mortal sin) makes you evil
- there's a large set of mildly evil deeds that make your alignment creep evilwards (venial sins) but they can never push you past neutral to evil
- good deeds make your alignment creep good-wards, but they can never push you from evil to neutral
- the only way you can get from evil back to good or neutral is via an atonement spell or equivalent
- there's no limit on how often you can cast atonement spells

Sloth's system is basically like this, except we have more restrictions on atonement spells, and you can compensate for mortal sins with a LOT of good works. If you view a good work as the conjugate of a sin, then I would say we're a bit more symmetrical than Catholicism.

[Hobbes]

The issue at hand with sloth alignment is not how you define it, but that you can't play the game very well and remain one alignment. Quests require you to cycle good and evil mobs, to get a good set of EQ you have to cycle good and evil mobs. One example, the jjd is all evil or neutral mobs except the dragon. (although maybe this changed recently, I didn't lose peri last time I killed him.) Buying EQ doesn't solve any moral dilemma as you are at least financing the wrong doer, or right doer. And there are no long term benefits for remaining one alignment so what's the point beyond losing a supplicant every now and then?

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing in the game. It gives players freedom to go anywhere and do anything without worrying too much about alignment, those who depend of supplicants excepted. And if you are trying to match it to any real world moral system or ideology, don't bother. The entire game is based on killing. Try to level past newbie stages without killing something. Unless you are a firm believer in the crusades I don't know how endless killing can ever be morally justified. The whole mud would be evil.

I view the alignment as nothing more than a feature of the game which adds interest and really has no basis whatsoever in actual good or evil, and I kind of like it that way. Makes things simpler.