Suggestions for Fixing Unnecessary Muflation

[eqjenius]

The Grupo thread (http://shardsofdalaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24697) got me thinking about the ways that game mechanics allow players to gain experience without doing any work, which I think is the #1 cause of unnecessary mudflation in SoD. I think rewarding players without their doing any work at all is bad for the game, so I've made a list of the best ways I can think of to address these problems.

1) Fix guest-lock to also include faction lock and experience lock. If you can't trust someone to not screw over your character, this person shouldn't be getting you free experience/faction.

2) Reduce or remove experience gain from grouped characters that have been inactive for 10 minutes. If they return from AFK (cast a spell, run in a circle, whatever) their XP returns to normal.

3) Ringers: New characters can't run around with tier 11 gear since the best items in the game are no-drop. To me, inactive tiered toons which are easily accessible is the same as a piece of tier 11 gear for your noob toon. Actually, it's like 20 pieces of T11 gear and a shitload of tomes.

I suggest making accounts inaccessible to non-primary IP addresses after 10 consecutive logins from non-primary IP addresses. Inactive accounts (including old ringers and buffbots) would quickly cycle out of the game, and no one else would be particularly affected.

4) Add a 15% xp bonus across the board. May or may not be necessary, but it would make the people most affected by these changes happier, and would further reward people who are actually active in the game.

As was the case in the other thread, I don't expect many players to support these ideas. We are self-interested individuals, and removing options which aid our conquest of the game makes us feel powerless. Still, I would appreciate constructive feedback.

P.S. For the sake of transparency, these changes would affect me as well. I've recently invested about 20 AAs into an old guild mate's inactive beastlord to turn him into a buffbot, and I regularly box with an old friend's druid who is inactive these days. I also go AFK in groups and leech experience from time to time, and I have benefited in the past from the use of ringers in raids. I recognize that almost everyone in SoD has benefited either directly or indirectly from these game mechanics which I am proposing be altered.

 

[Loxo]

2) Reduce or remove experience gain from grouped characters that have been inactive for 10 minutes. If they return from AFK (cast a spell, run in a circle, whatever) their XP returns to normal.

I like it. I like three too, however it could be managed. Would it be difficult to establish and maintain current primary IP's?

 

[Rorne]

I suggest making accounts inaccessible to non-primary IP addresses after 10 consecutive logins from non-primary IP addresses. Inactive accounts (including old ringers and buffbots) would quickly cycle out of the game, and no one else would be particularly affected.

I saw you make this suggestion before and somehow it escaped you how much of a headache this would be due to people like students relocating to different areas during different times of the year, or people moving to a new house, or people who travel for work but still play etc etc etc. So either you would have to add an automated system to reassign the primary IP (which makes the entire system easily circumventable) or you have to get a GM manually reassigning it. In other words it's a bad system.

 

[oozu1234]

1) Fix guest-lock to also include faction lock and experience lock. If you can't trust someone to not screw over your character, this person shouldn't be getting you free experience/faction.

Sadly im not as bad as Grupo. but i've given my guestlocked warrior out to anyone that has asked (never publicly given out info's like grupo lol) but with this said i've gotten around 100 aa's that i didnt earn from this... With that said I LOVE THIS IDEA if this was some how possible.

As for Ringers and Buff bots. Man get over it these are apart of the game and alot of people even rely on them. and theres really nothing wrong with it! why take apart an engine with a stick when you have a full tool set in the garage?

 

[Boehm]

DHCP

 

[Silosobi]

I agree with slowing down mudflation in theory, but your suggestions show that you either have a very weak understanding of the game, or aren't thinking any of this through.

1) Faction lock is very exploitable. Suddenly anyone/everyone can kill giant or dragon for their friends by just locking faction. I have seen retired/whored out characters gain absurd amounts of experience, and very few of them used guestlock. Stopping exp with guestlock would be more of an annoyance than a mudflation prevention. The ONLY character it would really slow down is Grupo, who in the grand scheme is a very very small offender, in trade for annoying many many people who have gotten accustomed to using guestlock frequently.

2) This one might be a very small help, but leech exp is already pretty slow to begin with. It will also only hurt people who are actually trying to leach while they leave their house, when I have leached, I'm usually doing homework or watching a movie or w/e where it would be easy to sit/stand every 5 min. Furthermore leach groups/exp help promote/strengthen SoD community. Its an odd thing, but leach groups tend to bring people together of vastly different tiers, playstyles, guilds, etc. I remember when I was a nub I got into a few high end exp leach groups and I didnt even afk, me and the other nubs just hung out and talked about how awesome exp was and I actually made a couple friends in those groups that stuck around a while. I'm not entirely opposed to this one, but its a pretty tiny gain, with a cost.

3) Yep, people have been talking about the ringer problem for years and nobody has a workable solution yet.

IP Addresses: Rorne pretty much covered this one. It will be a massive headache for the GM team, and easily abusable.

Retired toons are also not entirely bad. There are situations where a key member in a guild quits and there are no available replacements that wouldn't require excessive backgearing. Nobody likes backgearing, and it may even be that more members would quit before doing that, so you just continue boxing that character to keep the guild going. I have seen this happen lots of times. SoD just doesn't have the population to be able to fill whatever vacancies a guild has. Sometimes your options are to box in ringers/retirees or just stop raiding, and when a raid guild stops raiding, many of its members are going to quit.

 

[eqjenius]

I saw you make this suggestion before and somehow it escaped you how much of a headache this would be due to people like students relocating to different areas during different times of the year, or people moving to a new house, or people who travel for work but still play etc etc etc. So either you would have to add an automated system to reassign the primary IP (which makes the entire system easily circumventable) or you have to get a GM manually reassigning it. In other words it's a bad system.

I'm a student, and I play on my desktop and my laptop. That's two different IPs. If my desktop is my primary IP, the only time I'd have to mess with anything is when I use my laptop 10 or more times consecutively to access SoD. In which case, I imagine I could change my primary IP address in basically the same way I change my password, or my primary email address.

I don't think it would be too much of a hassle. Not for me at least.

 

[oozu1234]

im not sure how they do it but Rift has a system where if you log in from a different IP address then the one that put a password up it will automatically Guestlock the account. and the only way to ever shut it off is to have the password typed into that comp (meaning YOU dont have to deal with Guestlock.... everyone who has your info's does) and you cant do really squat shit but exp

 

[Moraelintz]

1) Way to easy to exploit, and again if guestlocked toons no longer recieve exp I doubt there will be many/any toon sharing info

2) Neat in principle but I would imagine it is fairly hard to code and could cause lag issues, as there would be a timer always checking to see if you have done anything or are doing anything. Also, wouldnt a /follow on a groupmate negate this if the group is moving around?

3) Ringers are a by product of the end game. They are usually owned by a guild or a friend of the character that did put in the effort and the work to get the toon that far progressed so I see it as a continuation to help that guys friends progress.

I do not support anything that requires more work from the GM's to police. Especially when it is just to stop toons from being played.

4) I fully support this. I think there is allready a huge grind and with the addition of more and more tomes and more and more class tomes it can be very discouraging. It will not really affect the super high end as they have allready grinded a bunch of tomes wil help the newer people play catch up and not feel so far behind.

 

[eqjenius]

1) Faction lock is very exploitable. Suddenly anyone/everyone can kill giant or dragon for their friends by just locking faction.

I imagine the best way to deal with this would be to keep the current system in place, but to have in-game methods available for toons to fix their factions so that you're never permanently fucked. Blackscale already has a method for fixing its faction if you go KoS. So does Sadri Malath (which is a lot of work to fix, by the way). This way, GMs don't have to get involved if a faction is affected, and you still have to live with the consequences of sharing your info with other people.

I have seen retired/whored out characters gain absurd amounts of experience, and very few of them used guestlock.

The idea I had in mind was never to completely prevent this from taking place, the idea is to limit xp gain for a character to the people you know and trust.

if guestlocked toons no longer recieve exp I doubt there will be many/any toon sharing info

If you don't have access to a tank, maybe you or your guild will level one up. Maybe you'll get in a group more often instead of just boxing by yourself for XP. Or maybe you won't. Either way I don't see this hypothetical as necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Draeos]

Jraul has been gone a few days and will be a few more days, and i've been playing him for our guild, My question to you is should exo lose there main SK cuz i have logged him in over 10 times in the last few days due to him being at a funeral?

 

[eqjenius]

im not sure how they do it but Rift has a system where if you log in from a different IP address then the one that put a password up it will automatically Guestlock the account. and the only way to ever shut it off is to have the password typed into that comp (meaning YOU dont have to deal with Guestlock.... everyone who has your info's does) and you cant do really squat shit but exp

Not a bad idea. It might be applicable to SoD.

 

[eqjenius]

Jraul has been gone a few days and will be a few more days, and i've been playing him for our guild, My question to you is should exo lose there main SK cuz i have logged him in over 10 times in the last few days due to him being at a funeral?

In general, yes. However, Jraul has the option of finding an opportunity to log in and reset the count for you guys if he chooses. 10 times is also an arbitrary number, as well. The staff can determine where they think it should be set.

 

[Udeni]

1)This can be exploited with being able to kill a certain faction if you have it on. Idea to fix this is if you engage a mob (or otherwise get on the agro list) of a faction in which you aren't KoS (or a faction that you specifically flag, maybe a faction protection npc you can hail in a city) you get disconnected, just like if you try to destroy an item with guestlock on.

I personally would very much like this, so i don't have to be paranoid about people ruining my faction if they accidentally go somewhere. Or if i'm playing a friends toon, don't realize he's on a certain faction, and then ruin it and he can never repair it (ex: diety faction). It sucks when this kind of thing happens, and GMs generally won't do anything about it.

2)Kinda silly if somebody has to go afk for 30 mins because of RL stuff, but will come back after they're done. I can see how this would be used to prevent leeching, but the only time it would actually do anything is if the player is asleep IRL. Even then, they could set up some mechanical thing to physically press the sit/stand button a bunch, or even put a weight on an arrow key to make them spin or something. Not too hard to do.

3)Players still have to do work if they have info to a high tier bot, they have to box it. I don't really see how this *isn't* them working. And if its a full group, and one person is boxing the super overtiered tank, then the rest of the group still needs to help dps, and the healer still needs to heal some. And if its a bad healer, then hey you have to med up, which means less exp.

The IP adress thing sounds like it would be hard for devs to code. I see how it can prevent ringers, but as I stated, why are ringers SOOO terrible for the server? They help out a small, and i've noticed dwindling, server population, why would we want to make the game harder and less appealing to new players? If somebody doesn't want to use ringers because they don't have fun with it, and want to progress the old fashioned way, then they can. They can make a guild, and as the leader, they can say "I will not allow any ringers whatsoever in this guild" and be done with it.

 

[eqjenius]

1)This can be exploited with being able to kill a certain faction if you have it on. Idea to fix this is if you engage a mob (or otherwise get on the agro list) of a faction in which you aren't KoS (or a faction that you specifically flag, maybe a faction protection npc you can hail in a city) you get disconnected, just like if you try to destroy an item with guestlock on.

I personally would very much like this, so i don't have to be paranoid about people ruining my faction if they accidentally go somewhere. Or if i'm playing a friends toon, don't realize he's on a certain faction, and then ruin it and he can never repair it (ex: diety faction). It sucks when this kind of thing happens, and GMs generally won't do anything about it.

That's a really good idea, Udeni, and I think it would be pretty easy to implement. I second this idea.

 

[Zapple]

Isn't the high end raid game balanced around characters having a ton of tomes done? The recent nerfs to exp gain really seem excessive with this in mind. Yes, some characters are able to get a lot of exp-- look at the core raiders of the top few guilds. Some characters well, need a lot of exp however they can get it outside of obvious exploits. Obvious exploits like for example that one time during exp weekend this year where some guy was killing an instant respawn mob with next to no hp for hours on end and managed to finish several codexes before he was jailed and had the exp stripped when we found and reported him. I have a problem with things like that, but not exp leeching or someone else exping your character. Someone's still putting some legitimate effort in somewhere even with leeching in order to get that exp.

The whole tome grinding thing seems like a sort of pandora's box that creates a big rift in the playerbase. Why would you want to make it even worse?

 

[Dimmi]

1) The only way to stop mudflation is to stop the game.

2) All of the issues you bring up are not issues that staff should be trying to hardcode fixes for. The problem isn't the client or the game or zodiac alignment of Omicron Persyieie MXVII, it's the player-base attitude towards the game. Using other people's toons for ringers/buffbots/xp/etc will continue forever and ever because of the social structure of SoD.

This game has built some EXTREMELY strong friendships, which turns into "Hey man can you box me for tomorrow's raid in case xxxxx drops?" which evolves into "I've boxed John's toon so many times it might as well be mine toon now, I'll just load him up instead of making my own alt." Then eventually someone sees advantage and "hey other people will play my toon and progress me" and it goes on and on and on and on and on just like this wall of text.

The only way that stuff's going to stop is if SoD is made into a 1-player game. As long as people come to the server, log in to a game they enjoy the living shit out of, and make friends, that's how it's going to be. There are people out there who would rather make an alt and level it than bot someone else's toon, those people just aren't as visible.

At the end of the day, you have to realize not everyone plays every game the same, and not every game lasts forever. Some kids like joyriding in mom and dad's car, some kids like joyriding in their own car. Joyride's a joyride.

 

[Vartenaal]

That's a really good idea, Udeni, and I think it would be pretty easy to implement. I second this idea.

damage shield can own these mobs and you still lose faction and/or this would cause deaths just because sometimes youre not careful with illusion or w/e.

really simple idea to solve all this: dont be a douche and stop asking for GMs to put on strap-ons and use whips to "keep the populace in check"

if you dont trust someone to NOT be a douche with your info or you have doubts about them doing stupid shit like ruining your faction - dont give them the infos or take it away.

 

[eqjenius]

if you dont trust someone to NOT be a douche with your info or you have doubts about them doing stupid shit like ruining your faction - dont give them the infos or take it away.

Which is big part of the reason people aren't happy with the Grupo decision. However, the justification for that decision was based on the idea that people shouldn't be allowed to do malicious things to your character, period. As such, it's philosophically consistent to lock a character's faction along with that character's items. If a way can be found to accomplish this, it should be implemented.

 

[Vartenaal]

Which is big part of the reason people aren't happy with the Grupo decision. However, the justification for that decision was based on the idea that people shouldn't be allowed to do malicious things to your character, period. As such, it's philosophically consistent to lock a character's faction along with that character's items. If a way can be found to accomplish this, it should be implemented.

but there is a way already in place: you log in to find that your athica neck is gone or that newport guards dont like you quite as much as they did before - you change the password and try to find out who did this before you start letting people have access again.

i have botted and been botted a lot: the strat above works like a charm.