Illarion.org

#me hides in shadows, Even if they are in plain view is rp, because they could be next to a bush or something

But if you hide in the shadows of a building you are abusing a technicality of the game, there have been complaints and discussions about this since the first day I came to Illarion

Of course player of nop might have ment the first option but he didnt specify so I was making sure he knew about the second. And since you didnt know about the second it was obviously worth the post

That was just a figure of speech - of course there are no shadows to hide in. Hiding behind building isn't what I mean either - and it wouldn't help you because you can't see out of them either.

But hiding behind a corner and peeking around it real quick, ready to run if you don't like what you see works. Sneaking into a building and peeking through the windows works, too. Now don't tell me that is illegal.

But that was just the last paragraph of my post. Would you care to answer the main questions? I'd really like to know.

@ Nop

what my problem with it is, is that npc's have a limited amount of money and using teleporters i could probably raid every single npc in other town of there money, with little or no rp use, and while it costs money 60 for a there and back compared to the 200 some odd copper i stand to make well worth it. and since one could do it everyday (considering no one beats them to it) doesn't sound half bad, if you like that kind of rp. what i'm tired of is people farming the damn orc npc like hes a cashe cow.
As to the books themselves, form what your saying, if a criminal was running through the streets being chased by a mob, and everyone but he felt like rping, it's okay that he just click his book and vanish, giving no chance for anyone else to enjoy themselves, and in this same sense, if i see someone i don't like or a tresspasser or what not, i should be able to sneak up in the shadows and start beating them to death with a war hammer, because i didn't feel like giving them a chance to rp either? just because we can do something doens't mean we should

What if the teleport could be disrubted? the char doesn't move for 5 seconds before he is teleported... and if he is attacked, or pushed or anything... the teleport wont work...

This is my Humble opinion

that actually sounds pretty decent.

Do I understand you correctly: The problem is that the NPC is drained of money by these transactions? That they are bulk transactions?

How does this compare to the characters selling wagonloads of shields to Eliza, draining her copper. Is that abuse, too?

If the char in question actually spends some money buying from the orc, does this put things right for you?


As for the books: My feeling is using the book is ok, but should be accompanied by some RP.

As there is a considerable difference between removing oneselve from a scene and actively clobbering another char to death, I will not answer that comparison.

Unfortunately, during quests I have seen the GM-controlled chars disappear into thin air several times evading a confrontation. These examples naturally encourage a player to do the same if the game provides the means.

I don't like the idea of artificially slowing down magic books to hinder escapes. This most likely is technically impossible and will not give you any more roleplay, just a time window for revenge.

What could easily be implemented is creating reasonable preconditions for using the books. E.g. hold it in your hand (currently anywhere), have the other hand free, do not wear a helmet etc. Anything that actually has something to do with reading and concentrating. That way one would have to prepare for using a book or permanently run around with the book in his hands, defenseless.

Why do you consider selling items to the orc trader abuse? Isn't that what traders are made for?

Or is it just that you decided you want to block access to that trader and cannot enforce it? In that case I'd say guard him round the clock - but if someone catches you off guard - lucky for him.

By this mind set the castle of grey rose should be over taken by players who play in American time zone. Maybe they could do some hefty damage while not one knight was online?

I know my example is more extreme but players and GM's all say there is no life in other towns. Then however the players go about abusing a resource I assumed designed to make the north more appealing with out returning anything.
What the north is trying to do is not easy they are trying to play opposition to the majority of the games player base. This adds interest to the game and a much needed dynamic to our in game lives.
Apparently the players response is, Oh well aren’t very many of them I dont need to fear the tax even if i am caught trading I can teleport away so let me disregard the tense situation. After all the northern citizens are not logged on, so i won’t rp that the varshikar is a border town which would probably have a higher population than 10 players.

I mean when players walk through trollsbane and no one is around do you imagine it empty?
Myself i imagine the sound of traders call, blacksmiths hammers, town’s folks banter and playing children.
There are some people trying very hard to play northern citizens and living in that town. I do not see anything fair from my point of view in collecting 100 daggers and draining the orc of all money.
I dont see anything fair about using it at all really, as unless your character has a death wish, those Northern people are dangerous.
I certainly dont see anything admirable about teleporting in and out avoiding the confrontation.
So maybe i just have a strange concept of how the game is played.
Brian

As to books perhaps they should only work, in small areas.
The west gate of TB
The spot you land in V
Just outside Greenbriar.
Basically books can only be activated in the places they send you to. As right now we all use to moan about logging. Now we have made logging a legality...
My crime was interupted "poofs"
I am not going to win this fight "poofs"
I am half way down a crypt and out of potions "poofs"
I am full of loot and cant move "poofs"
I am carrying to much iron to move "poofs"

30 coins is nothing for profit one can make quickly useing the books. How ever raiseing the price spoils there actual purpose makeing the game more easily traveled so players can go to other towns and locations. My answer above is to my mind eloquent as then at least players would have to make a dash for the teleport spot to effectively "logg" mid conflict.
Brian

Edit
Alternatively teleporting only works if you have no armor on or weapons equipped. There by removeing it entirely from combat/conflict situations.
Although this will always be open to abuse as well, amazeing how fast some people can put on plate armor.

I see the problem with the situation. I had a problem with the empty locations being empty to me in the first few days, too.

But on the other hand, any location is not overcrowded 24h. Especially not during nighttime. And not every char is perfectly lawful. It would be just as bad if you publish a ruling in the forum and you'd expect every char to respect it and consider himself policed 24h. It just would make disregarding the rule more difficult.

Of course if there's more going on during supposed wee hours than in open daylight, that's crazy, too. And far from secretive or realistic. But I can't think of a solution either, short of locking away the area alltogether, as with silverbrand. But as long as something is openly accessible, I presume that you will find a chance to sneak in there if you just wait long enough.

Hm, no, there is an idea. Looking to RL for advice there is a historical solution: Build a city wall, lock the gates at night, have strangers pay for passing the gates.

And put the teleport target outside, of course.

Some Developers, GM's and myself too, think it would be the best if there are no teleporting books anymore.

Instead there should be NPC's in Greenbriar, Vanima, Varshikar and TrollsBane that are able to teleport the travellers without this books. This would solve the problem.

Aye, that would be better. town to town travling, not anywhere to town. perhaps later strong magicians can make teleportspell with which they can teleport others to a few fixed points at the isle, from anywhere they are.

I don' think it would solve the original problem. You can't bail out easily. But you can still walk into an empty town, do whatever you want and go to the NPC sending you home.

The original idea for the teleporters were quite different. There were several NPC's (dialogue written by yours truly) spread out around the map. They sold two different kinds of journeys: by boat or by ship.

Ships were hugely expensive as compared to the boats, but they were a lot less dangerous. Now with the boats there was a good chance of hitting a rock, being stranded somewhere on land, and losing some items.

The boats were often cheaper than the teleporters, though.

The ships could go to a lot of places, a little south of Varshikar, the elven city's docks, Greenbriar, the docks, etc. The boats could go to all those places and more, including up the river from the docks to Trollsbane, from the Northern river of Trollsbane up to Silverbrand (the boats between Silverbrand and Trollsbane were captained by two dwarves--one that was quite seaworthy and one that didn't like going on boats at all =)).

In any case, it made the docks central, because you couldn't, for example, buy a ticket from Tol Vanima to Varshikar, but you could get a ticket from Tol Vanima to the docks where you could find a ticket to Varshikar. While complicating travel, it would cost roughly the same, if you go by boat, excluding a crash.

Would the players prefer this sort of travel?

The problem that we had with this version was that one would have to pay for a boat from Tol Vanima to the docks, and thus new elves would be charged on the spot. If you can find a solution to that problem that is also fair, it can be done.

Elves could start with the tickets to Gobiath.

I like this idea. However, the boats would not be [that] dangerous if the players discover they can simply put all their items on a depot before using the boat ticket, what would make the appearing-no-where the only danger, that wouldn't be a very great one.

And about the teleporters... well, it's understandable that only trollsbane sells them, being the city the capital of the island and the biggest town with more number of citizens, in other words, more urban and with mor technology, to say so.

Hm, that sounds rather complicated, expensive and dangerous. You probably dropped that system for a reason. The main disadvantage I see with it is that you have no alternative if you want to cross the sea.

Right now you can decide wether to walk or buy a book. And while ferrymen usually get paid in RL, it is good that a beginner/broke character has the choice.


Just some other ideas on that matter:

Provide other, more mundane means to speed up travels.

1. make a char travel considerably faster on roads than on grass and introduce a way to acutally fix/build roads from stone. Would add a whole new industry to the game. I think it is sad the roads deteriorate but there is no way of fixing it. (but then I was eager to plant trees, too Of course we have no graphics for cobblestones, but we could hijack one of the single, small stone items for the purpose.

2. horses that speed up the travel on land (yes I know, no graphics and hard to integrate)

Make teleporter books a two step process:

3. using the book creates a gate somewhere in the vicinity of the char (3-4 tiles). You have to enter the gate to travel so you do not disappear instantaneously. Maybe the gate simply remains open for one rot cycle, so several chars could use one book, but you could also follow an offender through his gate. You just don't know where it will take you. Problem: Find item for the gates. And can such entrances be put on the map dynamically?

4. using the book takes some time for concentration. You have to use the books twice with a few seconds (3? 5?) between the attempty for reading the book properly. If you concentrated long enough, you teleport. If you clicked too early, you just restart the time period. This could be easily implemented in the scripts right now by noting down and comparing the last time the char clicked on a book.

What do you think about it? While 4. would solve the problem, I like 3. as it is much cooler and I would like something like 1. anyway as I think it would enrich the game.

3. using the book creates a gate somewhere in the vicinity of the char (3-4 tiles). You have to enter the gate to travel so you do not disappear instantaneously. Maybe the gate simply remains open for one rot cycle, so several chars could use one book, but you could also follow an offender through his gate. You just don't know where it will take you. Problem: Find item for the gates. And can such entrances be put on the map dynamically?

Thats really cool, and i would like it alot. that would make hunts very interesting, or grouptravels. but than books should be more expensive, perhaps

Nop wrote:1. make a char travel considerably faster on roads than on grass and introduce a way to acutally fix/build roads from stone. Would add a whole new industry to the game. I think it is sad the roads deteriorate but there is no way of fixing it. (but then I was eager to plant trees, too Of course we have no graphics for cobblestones, but we could hijack one of the single, small stone items for the purpose.

A very good idea! As far as I know, the changing of tiles with scripts is bugged, I am not sure, though. Building roads can also be done in quests. We could free one to two stones from the mining cycles, add them to the things one can find during mining and send players out to gather them. Changing the tiles could be RPed and !tile-ed.

Speeding up road travels is a very good idea, there is no great difference between grassland and roads. Maybe we can change that in the server code.

Concerning teleporters, I regard the books as a first approach, but they are no final solution for me. Standing in the middle of skeletons and disappearing by shift clicking an item is bad for game balance. Such effects should be restricted to very powerful mages IMHO. Something more static like boats and teleporter fields are known from other games and are what I'd call a robust design.

If you have a teleportergate appearing na few fields away you have to kill the skeletons to get to the gate, so you can't teleport just out of the fight. and maybe skeletons can follow through the gate

I like the portal idea... and there already is an item for it... [the red circle thingy]; moreover.. let other chars go in from the other side...

The stone roads would be a bit ugly i think.. immagine a road going from tb to greenbrair... through the forests ect...

Hadrian, the romans didn't think, oh craph forest, no more roads. Natural beauty comes second to fast traveling, even these days.

A trade road through the forrest! I feel a new character coming on, Robert Hood.
On a more on topic theme. We seem to be trying to make things harder for the majority to stop a few people from abusing what's in place already.

I like the idea of roads because:
a) of faster walking.
b) they could be used to get back to civilisation once you've wandered off too far again. Just keep walking till you hit a road then follow it.
c) could be used for RP thieves. Especially when we finally get depots that are town specific.

I would gladly change the books for a permanent travel portal in each town. You go to the portal, talk to an npc and pick your destination, You pay an ammount dependant on distance and then whoosh. As with all magics there is a small chance of something going wrong and you'll be dropped off in a random place on the island.

The romans expanded the cities.. you didn't have a road in the middle of nowhere...

Hadrian_Abela wrote:The romans expanded the cities.. you didn't have a road in the middle of nowhere...

Erm the roads connected the towns and cities so the road would have had something on either end but the rest of it was mainly in the middle of nowhere.

Personally, I like the road idea... but I think that it should be limited in scope. Either have some sort of 'guild', with road-making a GM-granted ability for only 'responsible' characters... or make it so that only certain areas can be used to build roads. The last thing we need, after the Jungle of Trollsbane, is the Great Gobaith Parking Lot.

However.. I *love* the idea of the books opening temporary portals instead of simply transporting the user. There are many reasons for this, and I will list a few of the more prominant ones, in my mind:

1) It would be ever-so-much easier to tell if someone has travelled as opposed to logged or disappeared thanks to a tree/building.

2) You could make the items to create the portal quite a lot more expensive, making them undesirable as a casual 'I feel like going to ____ for a minute' tools, while people could band together to split the cost; thus helping create bonds between characters, promoting RP, and cutting down on flippant use of teleporters.

3) It would be much easier for well-established chars to help out newcomers without feeling they are being put to an inconvenience. 'Well, you know what, I'm about to go down to ____, why don't you come along?' instead of 'Well, I was about to go to ____, but if you're going to come, I have to shell out 30+ coppers'.

4) As stated, if you wished you could *follow* an 'intruder', thus nullifying the convenient 'escape' aspect... from other players. I don't see the problem with still being able to use it to escape from big badguys if you have the capability... i know I've accidentally stumbled across big bad things in games before with no idea they were there, and only been saved because I always keep an emergency teleporter of some sort when available if I'm exploring.

So. There are afew of my thoughts. I love the idea.

Well, I had the idea about roads because I didn't really understand why e.g. there was no road connection between the harbor and any city. Probably the first thing you'd build in RL. After recent events, there is not a single through road left on Gobaith. It really looks like everything is falling into decay and I would like a way for people to change that.

As for the gates: If there's already a gate item (and it is free for use), I'll see whether I can build a prototype book/teleporter gate combination from the pieces we have and put it on the test server.
I don't see this as "making things harder for all because of the abuse of few". I rather see this as adding more flesh and possibilties to the game. Fight you way to the gate, travel with friends, chases. Maybe even a small chance that the one-way teleport misses your desired destination

We could have a boni/mali system on how you pass through the gates.. depending on what you are carrying/doing ect....

Portals are in place on the TS for evaluation. See post in TS forum.

Back to Topic.

I would be pleased if one of the players of Characters who live in Varshikar, could contact me, where to place the new traders for Varshikar.

Ill be on tonight Nitty poo

Nitty poo?! Oo oO

*Notes: No trader will trade with Arist*