Best Of

We get your frustration, you are heard. When things take off this quickly I am, frustratingly, slower to respond. It takes me a long while to parse things that won't just make things worse. A post goes up, I start formulating... see six replies, change my reply, see more replies, get frustrated, take a break, etc.

That's on me, and I apologize.

1 - Elixir Changes
Most of Aetolian combat revolves around priorities and this/that choices. A number of things like levitation had no choice involved, it was just act/react. The intention here is to bring them in line. Act-React is BORING.
2 - Celerity/Recovery
Distance means little. Ranged combat just doesn't work in Aetolia well. Before, room blocking and movement hindering were the only real lockdowns. The thought here was to give a midrange concept. People could be faster than one another, you might even have a chance to catch up. It also opens up a new range of afflictions, like shock, giving design space for new classes.
3 - Hiding
Beyond the irritation of act-react, there's the passive counter. If you have heatsight or lifevision, illusions and hiding do nothing. Illusions/Hiding have a cost, the counters are passive and do not. The idea here was to bring those things into a more active scenario.
4 - Test Servers
They aren't resource free. They either run on alternate virtual machines (and are slow) or technically use Aetolia's resources, affecting the main game. Aetolia Classic took more resources than intended to make sure it wouldn't affect Real Aetolia. Historically, test servers only get momentary attention by a few players, which makes the data not useful for normal gameplay. A test server also needs admin attention. Keroc running a test server is a Keroc who isn't working on normal Aetolia. We literally cannot even pay enough for them to be worth the effort, it's been tried.
5 - Allocation of Resources
I don't know how to say this any more simply: Resources are finite. Razmael works on X, Keroc on Y, Tiur on admin things, and volunteers whatever strikes their fancy. Mining is not done and adding Keroc to Mining will not make it faster, two people is not twice as fast. Every schedule I've ever had puts Keroc on classleads four times a year, so this is all within normal. I could ask him to help Razmael, but then classleads will stop while he gets up to speed. Volunteers do not just get thrown at tasks. For instance, Ylemnics was a volunteer project and was not scheduled officially, it was done when it was done and it had no effect on other projects.

While these changes seemed random and tacked together, from our perspective, they were all focused around the same thing: Design Space. Each change opened up room within existing design to add more possibilities within the game. This is a bit of our focus sometimes, to avoid constantly adding new things over top existing.


In the future, please know that immediate requests for artifact refunds, personal attacks, and dog-piling... these just hurt and discourage us. While we're always open to a dialog if you feel your monetary investment has been impacted, doing so respectfully can make these types of discussions much more productive. We are not a AAA game studio, everyone employed here does it not just for the money, but because we love Aetolia and want to. Keroc does a lot of this out of desire to see the game better and more interesting. No one is trying to invalidate your investment or ruin your time. It does mean, however, that we have an emotional investment too!

Sidenote: That's my explanation of the methodology behind the changes. Keroc has smarter opinions.

Gonna try to tackle each point. I want this to be viewed as constructive criticism, and I note that while you take time to parse things -- so do I. However, forgive me if I believe that my frustration, as well as the frustration on the playerbase at large, is presently beyond what you may be feeling. While this is by no means a competition, and I'm not trying to understate the frustration that you can have with the playerbase, these have been immensely frustrating changes at large for a variety of reasons that I won't re-hash again. Instead, I'm going to tackle the logic presented by each of your points.

Elixir Changes:
Yes, but sometimes what is boring is preferable to that which is frustrating, or that which contributes to said frustration by undermining the system currently in place with minute, experimental changes. Case in point from another IRE game: Lusternia had a similar issue with elixirs known as purgatives. Lusternia's answer was to overhaul the entire curing system while simultaneously not heeding the feedback from many of their experienced combatants. Lusternia's combat system is now, in so far as I'm aware of the criticism of major combatants who have played everywhere, regarded as even worse than it was before. The changes marginalized certain archetypes such as Warrior, and trivialized afflictions even more than they already had previously. My point with this example is: Act-React is boring, but boring is sometimes preferable to the alternative. I do not agree that the answer is to put these elixirs on the shared balance with health elixir. If your goal was creating a situation that undermines Act-React, it isn't successful. If anything, you've simply made these elixirs insignificant and unlikely to be replaced in the midst of combat if going against a class that has even the slightest bit of alpha damage or mana drain. The reason for this is because there are very, VERY few situations where health elixir, or even mana elixir, should be prioritized below these elixirs because that can mean death. If you're dead, the notion of raising frost, venom, or levitation is moot. A few exceptions exist, sure, but the only time Immunity comes into play is really with Syssin, and a Syssin is only employing Voyria once you've most assuredly been locked and given thinblood, at which point drinking an elixir becomes irrelevant as you've got anorexia and can't heal it. As a related aside, one of the catalysts that brought about this change sooner than was intended was Pit, but I have already iterated why this change still makes Pit a non-decision in an earlier post. It is preferable to simply fall into the Pit if you're the primary target, or just quickly ensure that the Indorani is incapable of ensorcelling. The amount of time it takes for levitation to be stripped AND for the Pit tick to fire again is plenty of time for Spirit to immediately mount a response and target those ensorcelling. In short, your intended goal was not achieved, and instead you've created a ton of client-side work that needs to be done for these changes, work that needs to be made for Firstaid to accomodate these changes effectively, and more all for something that did not achieve the result you were intending. Act-React is simply the cornerstone of how IRE combat works at the base level, it's the very concept of code-based triggers and scripts as a case-in-point, and it will take a massive overhaul to change that which goes far, far beyond what you've touched here.

Celerity/Recovery
I don't necessarily disagree with the existence of something like Shock, nor do I disagree with the underlying premise that distance means little; however, as I said in an earlier post, a suspension of belief is sometimes necessary for games such as MUDs for the sake of your players. Ask Starmourn how players view the act of it taking ages to travel around in a ship, and they'd probably tell you that they spend most of that time AFK and doing something else. I'd rather stay engaged with the game that I'm playing. I can say with certainty that it is the same with aetherships in Lusternia and just makes things more automated than you'd probably care for them to be. Honestly, the existence of artifacts like wings and amulet are always going to trivalize travel and escapes, and you and I both know that these are popular artifacts and money makers for IRE, so they're not going to get rid of them. By touching the regular means of travel, you only widen the disparity between the "haves" and "have nots" on something that should be relatively minor to begin with. It still takes time to get from Point A to Point B, but a multitude of classes have means at their disposal to simply bring their allies straight to them or rescue them from dicey situations. Sure, there's counterplay, but no one is going to monolith the entirety of the world with comms being what they are. If your goal was to stop people from running so easily, then Shock/Recovery is a good step forward, but it should come into play when players are subject to an aggression check made by themselves or by others. Reducing the player's ability to get around when not in combat situations is just tedious and frustrating. Reducing the player's ability to get around when in combat and trying to escape would be far better received, and I guarantee that this change would've been embraced far more had it simply had an aggression check attached to it. That'd be my recommendation for it moving forward.

(Side note: I also don't fully quite understand the idea of how ranged combat is related to these mechanics. I've always been of the opinion that ranged combat, being that it is a relatively risk free option, should come with less returns since the player is exhibiting less risk by not standing in the same room as everyone else.)

Hiding
Yeah, but the solution isn't to gut Hiding, Lifevision, Heatsight, Shroud, and a bunch of other abilities that have artifacts, antiquated artifacts, and class skills associated with them. Not unless you're prepared to deal with the inevitable fallout resulting from that, especially when you offered those effects in a promo not more than a month ago now. That is just begging for a terrible response. If you wanted to make Hide more effective and disagreed with the proliferation of Heatsight, the best solution would've been to remove Heatsight from racial skills while allowing the classes that possessed it or Lifevision in some form or another to retain those skills in their previous forms in order to act as a counter to Hiding. What you've done right now is make coldblooded useless, grossly inflated the value of the Camouflage relic, gimped Syssin Backstab, reduced the value of the antiquated goggles after JUST having a promo for them on sale, impacted the worth of the Lifevision artifact WITHOUT addressing its cost, impacted the value of the Shroud artifact without addressing its cost, downgraded Lycanthrope technically, made illusions better for combat reasons (and I'll get into why this is terrible shortly), downgraded Shaman and Carnifex, and indirectly buffed Indorani/Sciomancer/Ascendril (which are three classes that probably did not need it right now). The best solution here, as I said before, would've been the removal of Heatsight as a racial skill for endgame and then adding some of the new racial skills that Grecht, Kobold, and others have had. There would've been some backlash to losing Heatsight, sure, but if there had been new racial skills to replace it (ones that would have minimal combat implications and really just offer QoL incentive and reasons for people to spend racial skill points) then I guarantee you'd have more positive than negative. I still feel that this is the best solution.

As for illusions, I'm going to tell you why server-side curing killed them for the most part, and why this was one of the most well-received changes across Aetolia, Achaea, and Imperian as a result. Coding anti-illusion is -hard-, flat out. It means that most of the functions that comprise your system at a client side level need checks, conditionals, and other "janky" means of implementation for the possibility that someone is using an illusion to force your client-side triggers to do something that can be potentially catastrophic for your character in a combat situation. However, it isn't Lifevision that makes illusions trivial, it's the existence of Firstaid. In short, all you've done with the Lifevision change is make it to where those with a majority of server-side curing have a massive advantage over those using client-side, when the advantage was arguably already with server-side curing due to the fact that it is free of latency restraints and will operate even if the player goes linkdead or otherwise. There is no major illusion that you can create that would fool server-side, and most combat-based illusions back in the day involved fooling curing balances. What Firstaid does not cover is offenses and a few other mechanics that need to generally reinforce someone's server-side curing on the client's end. The illusions that ended up being used by someone like Azami were generally to fool an individual into resetting their offense tracking, making the target think they were dead in order to pause their client side code, etc.. These are not fun to deal with, and breaking people's code is just anathema to what really should be involved with combat. It should be about taking advantage of people's poor curing priorities, or making an opponent over-commit when they should be running away. Additionally, if the goal was to make illusions better, then you still haven't done that as Hypersight is still 100% illusion detection while simultaneously being YET ANOTHER willpower drain on classes. If you look at the drains for most of the abilities in Aetolia, they are disproportionately weighted towards willpower. It's to a point where I question why endurance even exists as a resource. You've just made already will-starved classes like Carnifex, Shaman, Teradrim, and to an extent both Mages, struggle even more with having to counter a combat concept that hasn't been (and should not be) relevant since the advent of server-side curing.

Test Servers
Fine, but there needs to be greater transparency when changes like these are around the corner. One of the primary reasons that this generated the negative feedback that it did is because, despite what some folks in the Pools might believe, these were major changes that came out of nowhere and were not requested by the playerbase at large. Achaea has the ACC (Achaean Combat Council), which is not classleads, but has a number of combatants across the game discuss impending changes with the administration that may impact combat balance. It's also where the Garden can solicit or obtain feedback on potential changes and what they would mean for the playerbase prior to their implementation. I want to state why I feel this would be pertinent for Aetolia to implement. The reality is that the perspective that you guys have up in the Pools is detached and different from the perspective of the players, and this is especially true on things that impact combat at times if these changes are any indication, as well as some of the erroneous past judgments that Keroc has had to reverse course on in past liaisons. That is not a knock on Keroc, as people can make mistakes, but it simply means that you could take and accept perspectives from the playerbase into account prior to making massive changes in combat like this. Almost every fighter has come out against them for a variety of good, logical reasons, to a point where it is almost baffling as to how and why the Pools are digging in and justifying them. We've provided ample reasoning as to why they don't achieve your intended design goals, and I don't know what more can really be said on this front.

Allocation of Resources
I have nothing to say on this, because I know this already. I know that your resources are limited, I know that there is not time enough in the day for things. However, as someone who has worked in customer service and is a supervisor myself, you have to take perspective into account. The responses to some things would be far better if players just got a: "Hey. We're aware of this. I can't promise an immediate action on it due to other projects, but we will assess it as we are able" rather than what seems like being flat out ignored or forgotten. There have been a few times where I've sent messages or e-mails only to get flat out no response or update for months at a time. While I am patient, because I know and understand that IRE's resources are indeed limited, it is nonetheless immensely frustrating to feel forgotten about or really just ignored because the Pools just don't want to address it out of, by my perspective, a desire to avoid confrontation and conflict. I get that some players are going to be vitriolic, I get that some are going to be negative and mean about things, but that doesn't mean all of us are incapable of empathy or understanding. What I am incapable of understanding is how responses can simply go months without a single acknowledgement, and I think the Pools can relate to how that would feel if the shoe was on the other foot. I will repeat an earlier post that I appreciate everything that the administration and the Pools do. I try to be understanding, empathetic, and pleasant wherever and whenever I can. If I criticize decisions, it's not an attack on the administration or Aetolia's volunteers, it is simply because I care enough about the game to indicate that this is a bad design decision for a variety of reasons. I will never just say, "This fuckin' sucks". I will always outline why I think something is bad, I will admit if I end up being wrong or my logic is faulty, and I will always try to provide feedback or suggestions for change.

That is all I have to say on these matters. I sincerely hope you and Keroc will take them into consideration, especially in regards to reverting these changes. I've had very little drive to play Aetolia as of late simply because of them, and the lack of a response for an extended period (even if it was just a small one), was beyond frustrating. No one is going to judge the administration poorly if they come out and say, "Okay. These changes weren't great and we're reverting them", nor would it somehow be used as a weapon in the future against changes that the administration makes. The point ultimately is though that the playerbase, as a large whole, has rejected them. Regardless of your intent towards addressing certain issues, there is a reality that any leader needs to face when one of their ideas or suggestion is ultimately not well received. The solution isn't to dig in, but sometimes to also relent and look for or solicit different ideas moving forward.

As someone who was mostly fine with the changes - and even thought they were a decent direction for Aetolia - I have to admit that the resulting communication and response from administration has been incredibly, well, lacking. Six days. Almost an entire week before we get a response that explains a little of the thought processes behind the changes, but details and outlines no plan for moving forward, no plan for artifacts, and seemingly no plan to further constructive feedback between administration and players. You have, yet again, dropped the ball, @Tiur, and continue to make excuses for doing so and deflect blame with empty platitudes. We get it. You're real human beings with real feelings. You're also still paid staff working for a business with customers that pay your salary. You have to step up and do better.

In six days, you should have had a plan - for both how to move forward regarding these changes and implementing artifact changes/refunds. You're right, you're not a AAA game studio, but you're also not a ragtag startup underdog. IRE is 20+ years old. The lack of respect for players and inability (or non-desire?) to communicate clearly, openly, and transparently is inexcusable. And it's not the first time with you as Producer. There is a whole lot of "do as I say, not as I do" coming from the Pools regarding behaviour and respect, and it's just kind of sickening to watch at this point.

8/1/2020 at 0:08
Tiur, the Gnosis
Everyone
August Promotion

We're off pattern at this point, so I'm just picking promotions I like!

This month, the Iron Bank returns! HELP IRON BANK will have a lot of the basic information. Keys are available for purchase on the website.

The gist of it though:

Keys open vaults in the Iron Bank. The bank has a set variety of prizes, detailed in the aforementioned help file. There are pieces of keys possible, in the milestone wares shop (give us at least 24 hours if you don't see them), that when combined make a key. IRONBANK verb offers a number of things you can do at a vault, including looking at the prizes already won and which remain.

To start off, we'll be vanilla, and then at the refresh I'll try out some riffs on the idea! If you have ideas you'd like to see tried, feel free to comment on the forum post this announce generates. I expect to be trying out a High Stakes version and a version that collects the 'leftovers' from the other vaults.

Minipets
--------
a sunrise, birdwinged butterfly *NEW* x1
a blue and black hairstreak butterfly *NEW* x1
a spotted longwing butterfly *NEW* x1
a leopard lacewing butterfly *NEW* x1
golden exchange token x5 (For those that forget, this ensures an exchange makes a pet you do not
own)

NOTE: I will be swapping out the least won butterfly for the first half of the month with a fifth new butterfly. All butterflies are insects.

Credits
-------
25 x20
50 x5
100 x1
250 x1
500 x1

Bound Credits
-------------
30 x19
50 x5

Items
-----
a hunting boon token x1
a small bag of chocolates x10
a cryptic chest x10
artifact salvage x4
XP Chalice x3
a box of artifact vials x1

-T

PS Give me a sec on HELP IRON BANK. I pulled it down to rewrite after I noticed an egregious error in languagification that I misdid

Penned by my hand on Gosday, the 18th of Midsummer, in the year 489 MA.

We get your frustration, you are heard. When things take off this quickly I am, frustratingly, slower to respond. It takes me a long while to parse things that won't just make things worse. A post goes up, I start formulating... see six replies, change my reply, see more replies, get frustrated, take a break, etc.

That's on me, and I apologize.

1 - Elixir Changes
Most of Aetolian combat revolves around priorities and this/that choices. A number of things like levitation had no choice involved, it was just act/react. The intention here is to bring them in line. Act-React is BORING.
2 - Celerity/Recovery
Distance means little. Ranged combat just doesn't work in Aetolia well. Before, room blocking and movement hindering were the only real lockdowns. The thought here was to give a midrange concept. People could be faster than one another, you might even have a chance to catch up. It also opens up a new range of afflictions, like shock, giving design space for new classes.
3 - Hiding
Beyond the irritation of act-react, there's the passive counter. If you have heatsight or lifevision, illusions and hiding do nothing. Illusions/Hiding have a cost, the counters are passive and do not. The idea here was to bring those things into a more active scenario.
4 - Test Servers
They aren't resource free. They either run on alternate virtual machines (and are slow) or technically use Aetolia's resources, affecting the main game. Aetolia Classic took more resources than intended to make sure it wouldn't affect Real Aetolia. Historically, test servers only get momentary attention by a few players, which makes the data not useful for normal gameplay. A test server also needs admin attention. Keroc running a test server is a Keroc who isn't working on normal Aetolia. We literally cannot even pay enough for them to be worth the effort, it's been tried.
5 - Allocation of Resources
I don't know how to say this any more simply: Resources are finite. Razmael works on X, Keroc on Y, Tiur on admin things, and volunteers whatever strikes their fancy. Mining is not done and adding Keroc to Mining will not make it faster, two people is not twice as fast. Every schedule I've ever had puts Keroc on classleads four times a year, so this is all within normal. I could ask him to help Razmael, but then classleads will stop while he gets up to speed. Volunteers do not just get thrown at tasks. For instance, Ylemnics was a volunteer project and was not scheduled officially, it was done when it was done and it had no effect on other projects.

While these changes seemed random and tacked together, from our perspective, they were all focused around the same thing: Design Space. Each change opened up room within existing design to add more possibilities within the game. This is a bit of our focus sometimes, to avoid constantly adding new things over top existing.


In the future, please know that immediate requests for artifact refunds, personal attacks, and dog-piling... these just hurt and discourage us. While we're always open to a dialog if you feel your monetary investment has been impacted, doing so respectfully can make these types of discussions much more productive. We are not a AAA game studio, everyone employed here does it not just for the money, but because we love Aetolia and want to. Keroc does a lot of this out of desire to see the game better and more interesting. No one is trying to invalidate your investment or ruin your time. It does mean, however, that we have an emotional investment too!

Sidenote: That's my explanation of the methodology behind the changes. Keroc has smarter opinions.

7/26/2020 at 3:57
Keroc, the Starborn
Everyone
Celerity

Celerity has been reverted back to what it was before. Zoom.

I've decided to keep Shock around for now, although no one has access to it at the moment.

I'll keep an eye on what people say about the other changes for now. Celerity seemed to be the most unpopular, and with it reverted it should allow the other changes to get a little more focus.

Don't forget that:
Hypersight gives you 100% illusion detection.
Shadow lets you move and gain the Hiding defence for Backstab.

They're just food for thought, I'm not against rethinking things.

Small bug fix:
Elixir balance in GMCP should now point to 'elixir' instead of 'affelixir'.

Penned by my hand on Closday, the 8th of Khepary, in the year 489 MA.