Refining Reserves and Ylem Stockpiles

Moirean

So ylem has been out a while and it's gotten to the point where upkeep is a grind. Originally, there was a moderate encouragement to gather ylem at the personal level with the introduction of shell - you'd gather to replenish reserves and shell would consume those reserves. It was somewhat self-sustaining, but the perk was so-so and now blue orb completely overwrites it. Adding in more things to do with reserves would help motivate individuals to gather ylem, which would make the grind seem less...grindy, and would alleviate a lot of the headache cities feel at trying to reach upkeep This feeling of stress to meet upkeep is weirdly compounded by the vast reserves in the pylons, since we don't really NEED upkeep, but losing that stockpile still is a bad, negative number that makes people feel like they are failing in their job. We know that it's futile to chase the numbers but missing them still feels bad and hurts morale. It's a fairly lose/lose situation that creates frustration.

New Reserve Ideas 

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These skills would make gathering more attractive at the individual level. Numbers are obviously just examples.

• Attunement: Passively generate a small number of reserve energy when in an unstable zone (NOT the fracture).
  
• Enlightenment: Exchange 50% of your reserves for a 5% xp buff for 2 hours.
  
• Illumination: For a passive reserve drain, you can PATH FIND MINOR to find a minor in an area. Alternatively, have it cost 25% reserves and last an hour.
• Ferocity: Exchange 50% of your reserves for a 5% crit buff for 2 hours.
• Siphon: Siphon your reserves into a vessel. Either empower ylem shards or something enchanters make or creates an item. Basically lets you store reserves - and sell them to others. Make money gathering ylem!
• Swiftness: Exchange 15% of your reserves for a celerity buff for 1 hour.
• Aura: For double the drain, empowers shell to do double the mitigation. With the upcoming nerf to blessings, this would be niiiice to augment the nerf.
• Etc.

New Pylon Ideas

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Right now, upkeep can be easily maintained by the cities who have people with excess time or who win the lessers a lot, so we're all sitting around with these huge stockpiles of ylem. Introducing another tree will be nice, but the long term effects will just be to up the grind and stockpiles will build again. If there were a way to spend this ylem or use ylem in exchange for other stuff, that would help chip into the stockpiles. Some random ideas include:

• Let ylem be used to cover guard fees for a year. This would have a yearly base cost to activate and a daily drain based on guard fees.
• Let ylem be used in lieu of gold for city construction costs. This would have a base cost to enable and then the cost would scale based on construction costs.
• Have temporary city unlocks you could purchase with a chunk of ylem. For example, CITY RESEARCH BUY AMULETS would charge ### ylem and all of the amulet types would be on sale until the next quota.
• Enable a portal to Delve for a yearly fee.
• Spend a chunk of ylem to get a new mount type for sale in the city stable.
• Have long-term trade deals you could broker with Albedos merchants in exchange for ylem shards. Have certain food items, cloths, bashing buffs, mounts, chance items (eg stuff like cryptic chests or wheel spins), etc cost varying amounts of shards - people snag ylem from pylon to make shards, overall ylem goes down, etc.
• Guilds something something blah blah.
• Etc. These are just example ideas. Share your own!

Demarcus

Yeah! It would also be cool if we had like a mine or something that we could use to run semi-daily quests. Spines could call it the Vertical Mine Shaft #15, Enorian could call theirs the Emberbrite Mines, etc...

Oh, wait...

On a more serious note, +2 to everything the imp lady said. I like the consuming my shell for a +5% experience buff. Because it isn't OP, but the notion of me having a +5% experience buff gives me a little tingle inside.

Jensen

Can Spines have a airship port to delve?

Also, ylem research upgrade to add 5 more shops would be nice

Haern

Jensen said:

Can Spines have a airship port to delve?

Also, ylem research upgrade to add 5 more shops would be nice

No. That is something that won't be happening.

Jensen

I'm never getting a shop

Alexina

How about the city earns contracts from Delve with each Ylem quota they complete and these could be used to purchase various of the upgrades listed in this thread (would obviously need to be a fairly decent amount of contracts for each one). Would make it seem like you're actually trading resources for technology with a foreign state.

Calipso

Moirean said:

New Reserve Ideas 

------------------------------

These skills would make gathering more attractive at the individual level. Numbers are obviously just examples.

• Attunement: Passively generate a small number of reserve energy when in an unstable zone (NOT the fracture).
  
• Enlightenment: Exchange 50% of your reserves for a 5% xp buff for 2 hours.
  
• Illumination: For a passive reserve drain, you can PATH FIND MINOR to find a minor in an area. Alternatively, have it cost 25% reserves and last an hour.
• Ferocity: Exchange 50% of your reserves for a 5% crit buff for 2 hours.
• Siphon: Siphon your reserves into a vessel. Either empower ylem shards or something enchanters make or creates an item. Basically lets you store reserves - and sell them to others. Make money gathering ylem!
• Swiftness: Exchange 15% of your reserves for a celerity buff for 1 hour.
• Aura: For double the drain, empowers shell to do double the mitigation. With the upcoming nerf to blessings, this would be niiiice to augment the nerf.
• Etc.

My biggest beef with this idea is that it will reduce the amount of conflict exchanges in a game that already is deprived of such a mechanic.

Illumination: For a passive reserve drain, you can PATH FIND MINOR to find a minor in an area. Alternatively, have it cost 25% reserves and last an hour.

This would make it -far- too easy to locate minors and it will just become an automated system like bashing. Minors would have to be increased by double at least to compensate for others wishing to have a grab at them.

Enlightenment: Exchange 50% of your reserves for a 5% xp buff for 2 hours.

There are already -alot- of avenues for Experience bonuses in the game, I dont think we should be making it even -easier- to gain levels at the rate we already have.

Attunement: Passively generate a small number of reserve energy when in an unstable zone (NOT the fracture).

Same problem as the auto-minor locater, will become too easy with people just standing there soaking ylem with no real conflict. Even if they are now officially standing in an Open PK area, most people wont care because it is way too easy to collect ylem themselves and see no real point in putting themselves in possible danger to -maybe- thwart another org.

Siphon: Siphon your reserves into a vessel. Either empower ylem shards or something enchanters make or creates an item. Basically lets you store reserves - and sell them to others. Make money gathering ylem!

I was going to suggest something similar (and more dynamic) soon, mentioned below.



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Though this idea gives a new concept for ylem, I think it'll put it in the worse rather the better. When my idea for ylem is fleshed out, i'll be posting it in time. It is less code work and more direct involvement.

Moirean

How would it stifle conflict? It would encourage more people to go out and gather and to attend lessers (the attunement idea = passive reserves gain when you attend a lesser). The ideas are merely examples anyways. The "proposal" is for something to be done, period, to make gathering more attractive at the personal level. The details are merely details to illustrate ways that could be done.

Calipso

Moirean said:

How would it stifle conflict? It would encourage more people to go out and gather and to attend lessers (the attunement idea = passive reserves gain when you attend a lesser). The ideas are merely examples anyways. The "proposal" is for something to be done, period, to make gathering more attractive at the personal level. The details are merely details to illustrate ways that could be done.

In that case, I agree. I especially agree with introducing a market in ylem and thus introducing a whole array of gameplay by it.

Irruel

@calipso
My immediate reaction to the 'path find minor' idea was the same. Then I remembered that "leylines" actually gives you the room name, so if you have the area mapped you can path find it anyway.

It would only make it easier to find the minor if you could do it from other areas.

Serrice

That's only for lessers.

Nonetheless, the path find minor function still seems like a great idea.

Ilyon

Leylines don't show the room name for minors.

[edit] yeah, I'm super slow

Irruel

Oh yeah. Oops

Jensen

It's still pretty automated for those who know how to code or have paid someone who knows how to code.  I sure as hell don't manually search areas with a minor.

Setne

Jensen said:

I sure as hell don't manually search areas with a minor.

Daskalos

(Mudbot has a feature called 'Area Search Leyline' )

Teani

I manually search for minors, but that's because mudbot seems to need to pause all the time and I move faster without the search function because of it. <.<

Irruel

I bet you don't manually search the tundra.

Serrice

How much money would you like to wager?

Jensen

I bet you dont manually search mog

Moirean

I won't lie, I wrote a script to search everywhere, extract, kill elds and keep on going. I read forums and watch my tells window while it runs. I'm not really ashamed about it - if the system is the type that heavily encourages automation, there shouldn't be surprise when people heavily automate it.

Toz

(So let's make it so people don't need to automate it and can just PATH FIND MINOR once they figure out what area it's in >_>)

Teani

<.< I manually search ALL areas, so yes, Moghedu and the Tundra are counted there.

Moirean

Toz said:

(So let's make it so people don't need to automate it and can just PATH FIND MINOR once they figure out what area it's in >_>)

That was basically my point. :P

Irruel

Teani said:

<.< I manually search ALL areas, so yes, Moghedu and the Tundra are counted there.

Me too.
Only, I have never managed to find one in either of those places - scidve can be a bitch too - so now I just skip those areas completely.

Well, in truth, now I just rarely bother hunting loci. Boring mechanic is boring; I get to play 1-2 hours a day, as if I'm going to run around doing boring stuff? I show at lessers and if I ever really need to contribute, that's what the fracture is for.

Aishia

 I think the reason the mapper feels slower (It really isn't) Is that it moves in bursts, consuming all the "movement balances" at once, then using them again. So it looks stop and starty. Maybe the only reason it's a little inefficient is cause it sorta just veers all over the area instead of searching in a distinct pattern. But it probably still ends up being faster all in all. Moving manually you can often hit a speed where you never really hit that "SLOW DOWNNNN" wall, but that doesn't mean you're going faster.

Irruel

I haven't used the imapper focus search, but if it uses the same code that used to scout areas for shrines/troop captures, it does it by map pathing every single room, and would end up going through rooms multiple times, only updating the endpoints of each path.

Has it been improved since back then?

Aishia

It usually doesn't try to search one end of the area and then the other. It ticks off rooms as you move through them too and goes for the next nearest room.

Demarcus

Aishia said:

It usually doesn't try to search one end of the area and then the other. It ticks off rooms as you move through them too and goes for the next nearest room.

Oiy. Now you've piqued my interest. I optimization and decision making theory and whatnot. You have me wondering if the above is the most efficient and fastest method. Then again, it depends on how you define efficient and fastest. Fewest number of moves? What about finding stretches you can gallop or dash though, count that as one move? Hrrrrm... ponder ponder. For areas that have multiple entry points, does the script start wherever you start it? Maybe there is a room that is better to start in than others? Ho hum! I have had entirely too many stimulants tonight.

Since I don't code though, I'll still go by hand.

Teani

I believe the mudbot leyline searcher goes from lowest room number and up, which means that any rooms you have created in the area after the initial mapping will be searched in the end (thus making you run through rooms you've already searched to get to them). So unless you go in and manually alter the numbers in Mudbot to set up a better (more efficient) route by numbering the rooms how you want them, I'd say manual search is better (if you know the area well and can move quickly).

Sure, the leyline searcher has the benefit of you not having to sit there and press any keys.

Ishin

There's a command in mudbot you can use to recompile the room numbers, or so I thought.